Poems 2002

POEMS 2002

ON NAZIM HIKMET COMING OUT

Somehow the poems kept going

as a violinist keeps bowing.

Winter is not the time for sowing,

when it’s too cold the cocks stop crowing.

The solo instrument and the órchestra.

The chorus recite in the orchéstra.

Bodies are fit in the palaestra.

The Ambassador is jealous of me in Porchester Place

for Nazim Hikmet is out –

a threat to any totalitarian state,

with his imprisoned poems’ fate

leaving us in no doubt

that a poem has more clout

than the truncheon or the knout.

30 December 2001

HAPPY NEW YEAR

New Year always follows Happy

even though the weather is crappy.

I am usually a happy chappy

and this New Year is no exception.

Of Nazim Hikmet I have a dozen copies,

Negar’s ‘On Wings Over the Horizon’ is on floppies.

They’re deciding the fate of the opium poppies.

I await two books’ reception.

Is my mentality of sentimentality soppy

around this New Year as I drink hoppy

lager beers? Am I hitting top C

or is this all a rhyming deception?

Read this my first attempt at Rubais,

the only way you’ll hear them is through your eyes.

30 December 2001

FOR NATHALIE

The Old Year has broken into the New Year,

would that peace would break out here

on earth. Palestine we share

and Afghanistan I claim,

and wars flare

and the bombs are aimed,

but you say romance can be ‘calm and explosive’.

Fireworks outside my window, different missives

from those war-headed missiles

and I am not writing a Papal Missal,

nor playing the Minister prime or holy,

but filling the minutes after midnight actively

reaching my words to you by pen then electronically,

saying to you: tragically

this is our world, this is me

surrounded by my vast library,

writing at the table that I wrote

that love poem you caressed back, and I quote:

‘travelling deep inside of me like a ghost without a coat’:

you don’t know how much it means to me that note,

for recently I’ve written to audiences of one,

suddenly the red bird is kissed by your sun.

1 January 2002

All trembling – not from caffeine –

but in reality I’m feeling fine.

First interpreting of the New Year,

happy – less in fear,

since so many friends are near

and far till distance means nothing.

Perhaps out of my sight the dead are living

in a universe not unlike a university

or institute of advanced studies.

*

The days go by with no meeting

yet our hearts are in the right place.

The winter is concentrating on sleeting,

not up to the snowflakes’ lace.

The glistening dark blue tarmac.

There is a stain on father Mac’s mac

and my overcoat has holes in it,

and I am listening to the Russian poets.

I came out from under the Berg coat,

the poet’s father’s given to me in Philadelphia

not Gogol’s Petersburg that he wrote

and once I drank from the spring at Delphi.

I never met Nazim Hikmet but I know the photograph

of him with overcoat in Bursa prison. This is my graph.

7 January 2002

I sleep in three hour blocks.

By my pillow lies Alexander Blok,

Tsvetaeva, Rumi, Arab Women’s Poetry,

Kluyev, Negar, Nathalie Handal et al.

They are like my family tree,

close mates of mine, foul-weather pals.

So it is true that I don’t sleep alone,

that their poetry has entered my bones,

that they are more powerful than e-mail and phone,

packed with information, emotion,

fertilizing my intelligence quotient.

When I leave the room I carry

the books in my head, internally

digesting them, stomaching

their hard and easy lines, cracking

Russian jokes, and boredom.

They are my kingdom.

7 January 2002

FOR RUTH CHRISTIE

Today is Nazim’s 100th Birthday reading.

One thousand people will pack the hall,

despite or because of the fact that the world is bleeding

they will listen to the Romantic Communist’s call.

From Embassy to left wing organisations

uncomfortably rubbing shoulders,

revolutionaries will be at their stations,

Redgrave and Christie will read the bolder.

Turkey and Istanbul in London,

beyond the walls barriers will be undone.

I’ll read the plane tree, the cat and the sun,

our book will be on sale – our task done.

And I think of our long hours of translation:

today is Nazim Hikmet’s celebration.            

8 January 2002

VISIONS AT THE OSTEOPATH

When it was all black

with white rain falling

and I realised I was in space  ­–

it was lonely and I shook.

The shaking became more intense –

I died

and opened my eyes

to a vision of clear water flowing

and I was calm again.

Closing my eyes there was dark red

of the flowers, of Negar’s  book cover,

of Mick’s shirt.

The colour turned into a horse’s tail

and Mick was on the ‘corda Equina’.

Then I saw the pony in the field

exercising my Hippocampus.

From a family row I went down the drive

and turned left to the five bar gate

by the field, and there was our pony Jerry

licking my hand.

16 January 2002

So what if my hands and arms will shake,

as I deliver my submission

the hall in Istanbul will quake.

Nazim fits in with my mission.

Put it down to thyroid and nerves.

I’ll be staying in the Pera Palas,

the other side of St Sophia’s curves

and a long way from Ataturk’s palace

in Dolmabahce, the stuffed garden.

My will strengthens and hardens,

I will not go in and come out with a pardon,

for you I will retain my ardour,

though you still will be in London far away,

but language and poetry will unite us for four days.    pre 24 January 2002

Nazim can call Istanbul ‘my darling’

as though she were a woman.

I believe it is not a bad omen

to be with this city though away from any darling.

Are the plankton still phosphorescent

in the stream of the Bosphorus,

is the moon still crescent

and are there mezes for us?

This city is built on seven hills

and I bought books from Seven Hills Press

and religiously took my pills

to avoid bunalim or distress.

Few of my friends are left –

I’d chosen the older poets

and the ones that veered to the left.

Can and Oktay are gone but let’s

celebrate the living and the dead.

After 24 January 2002

‘No abysses but some holes ‘ she said,

and morning in Istanbul sitting on my bed

I write these lines to Helen,

not of Troy but London.

Here I slip between Turkish and Russian

and watch fish on the Television

on a coral reef.

My stay will be too brief.

Yet in this total linguistic immersion

I have time to think of Chomsky’s version

that will be taken before the court

this February in the Sublime Porte.

My submission on Hikmet in Turkish I read,

the words were more from my heart than head,

and with Sarah I talked of ambition and mission

and with a stray physicist of Nazim’s quantum quotient.

Adonis is here ‘the last great international

poet’ as Ozdemir Ince said.

No fists raised, no singing of the International,

but blood is still red and shed.

Last night at ‘The Under the Plane Tree Restaurant’

we ate the mezes and sea bass,

talked of Ted Hughes in Macedonia

and whether poetry or public are crass.

So many tongues concentrating on Hikmet,

so many minds and hearts met

here in Istanbul and I had to be honest:

this democratic wrangling is the best.

26 January 2002

Pera Palas Istanbul

Nazim’s pearls were not cast before swine,

this was his time, his 100^th birthday present,

let my poems like his be prescient,

let my package be bound with Turkish twine,

inside a book ‘Beyond the Walls’

and I forget all falls

physical or of morale

and concentrate on facts and the spiritual.

26 January 2002

Pera Palas Istanbul

Draft at Nazim Hikmet Symposium

I and Anar take our glasses off to read

as though the eyes must lead

the lines that bleed.

Hikmet is still a dangerous poet

cut off in his life like coit-

us interruptus and his interpreters

still interrupt us with their interpretations.

Sheikh Bedreddin should be a film, Necati says. ? 27 January 2002

GRAVES’* DISEASE

My thyroid is gripping my throat,
causing me to sweat and shake
especially in new jacket and coat;
my thirst I can never slake.

The Guy’s Bosnian doctor, she said:
‘Double your dose of Carbimazole’,
sometimes I feel dead-
beat, my body wanes but waxes my soul.

I find I can interpret and read intensely,
but there is something wrong definitely,
no craving to smoke, reduced appetite,
I feel tense and tight.

Radioactive iodine might bring relief,
hoping this episode will be brief.

*Graves disease, a condition of hyperthyroid, is named after the great
grandfather of the poet Robert Graves.

1 February 2002

I see you at MF rarely,

barely a meeting,

fleeting is our contact.

I’d act no different

if it weren’t for the launch

approaching.

Really no anxiety

axes my nerves.

Verve I observe

and we deserve.

So no swerves

in the road of our lives:

poet gives

translator takes

and gives

no reason for heartaches:

serenity round deep blue lakes.

1 February 2002

POEMS IN THE PUB

I

It’s a blank sheet of paper

as it was in hospital

seventeen years ago.

A pint of beer, a pipe,

Vol. III of Oktay Rifat

and a Turkish-English dictionary,

a poster with a beautiful girl

and our names together –

poet and translator and readers.

A host of joggers

has invaded the pub,

I am by no means bitter

with my pint of bitter unusual for me,

not in any way do I reject your first book.

It remains a milestone

buried in your past, your girlhood,

forgive me for unearthing it

and deciphering the writing,

even hinting at the meanings.

II

So I could not read the love poems,

not that it was an illicit love.

These other poems have entered many homes

and their heroine too was called my dove.

I wonder if great old loves don’t complement

the one that is in  the present –

it would be generous to think so,

like the pressure of poems’ ink flows,

dries and is forever read,

so associations trigger in the head

and she bears She, the Muse and More,

neither saint and certainly not whore,

but the joker with a laugh on her lips,

so we are experts at quips

and are united in our laughter

into the unknown territory of the hereafter.

III

THE NATURE OF MY LOVE

Shall I tell thee of what love for you means to me?

Can I convince others too of its purity?

‘Old enough to be your father’ as someone said,

but a kiss on both cheeks has hardly misled

us. Your physical is only part of your beauty,

but it never deflected me from my translator’s duty.

It was your words that stripped you bare,

but not your body, it was your soul standing there.

Sure, I built you up as my Muse,

perhaps both of us became confused,

but I think we never doubted a special love was hovering

close to poetry with prose of e-mails covering

the gaps where poems, translation and conversation did not suffice.

Warm-blooded, our blood will never turn to ice.

Love can be a soul’s prayer and flies

into the night air as it tries

to calm the laughter and the tears we may cry

as we interpret ourselves to ourselves.

IV

FOR HELEN

It hurts me to see them trying to tread you down,

though you will never be downtrodden.

Your black outfit is like a don’s gown

indeed you are six times an honorary doctor.

I’m in a pub writing poems of explanation

of my personal feelings not the state of the nation.

Yet into these feelings, thank God, MF percolates,

so I’m not sure if my fate is not our fates

and whether the words I daily interpret

are not their and my victims and culprits.

But it’s not me being deported to Germany

or with a three and half year old kid in detention.

I am living in Bermondsey

and to the differences I pay attention.

When you give your soul so freely,

you have to take heart from somewhere,

I noticed this quite early

in our friendship. Take, there,

these lines fly to sustain you

and mysteriously they retain you.

V

OKTAY RIFAT

Would you allow me to pause before I translate,

for the day has been tough and the hour is late

and tonight I want to write my own poems,

surely to goodness your poems can wait?

Just a pint and a half of London Pride

and poetry’s floodgates have opened wide.

You know I’ve always been on your side,

it’s always been easier for me to slide

into translations. I have nothing to hide

from you Oktay. I could have died

seventeen years ago. If you want, chide

me for that attempted suicide,

but when I hit the ground I earthed myself,

perhaps ultimately did good to my health,

and indeed the little child, the elf

saved me by innocent stealth.

VI

NAZIM HIKMET

Are you with me if your poems are?

Is this the immortality that means

you are with us – so close not far?

I only started writing poetry in my late teens,

Negar wrote a poem at the age of four:

I hold her up to you, Nazim, for she is torn

with emotion at her first book;

but I only needed one look

on the homebound tube to know

this was a girl’s first flow

of luminescent poems

and that she would be carried by them

to the greatest heights and the greatest depths

sometimes in danger, sometimes at peace

and that I must help her increase.

VII

LAST ORDERS

The music pumps

Clumps of words

Kurds to be deported

Immigration exhorted

Sorted for easy poems

Ohms burn light

Light sleepiness

Slight highness

from lines not of cocaine

but McKane.

VIII

LINE THEM UP

Short lines

don’t

snort lines

don’t

shoot lines

shield

them.

IX

After the bombs and guns

and the havoc wreaked on the Afghans

and another istan struggles

and the kids wriggle

on their non-existent stools

at their non-existent schools

and the refugees walk to another istan,

is the world stunned?

Yes, for a month or two. 

Whole Cycle 5 February 2002

FOR NATHALIE

The potent line

of a Valentine -

an old feeling

of total healing.

My body at a distance

from yours, but by chance

on top of yours,

like a line pours

over another line

and we are a couple

made up of couplets.

Oh, potent lines

of a Valentine:

do you have the feeling

that we have no walls or ceiling,

and that we are earthed on the floor’s bed,

lying parallel side by side,

reading and speaking the words I have said

as though we never had anything to hide

from each other -

and I am not your uncle or brother...

14^th February 2002

I happily cannot get out of my mind

your wonderful appearance at the party.

I can envision you but not find

the words - I would have to be more than a camera - an artist.

I will not even tell my readers what you wore,

though the colours were black and cream white.

I have never seen you as beautiful before

like a black or cream swan in full flight.

I love to make you laugh

and hear your laughter

and then after

to try and make you laugh again.

I know so well your words

from your lovely mouth, from paper,

they are listened to and heard –

I am a realist not escapist.

18 February 2002

It was the holes in the lace

that made your blouse transparent.

that made my heart race

and my astonishment apparent.

Jealousy was out of place,

beauty was salient,

the poet’s lines were traced

proving a young talent.

Those who don’t see you,

but read your poems,

are only blind to

your physical beauty.

It is the book’s duty

to represent you

and take you into homes.

20 February 2002

ON THE TRAIN

The train approaches the bridge over the Thames

slowing down in homage,

my bridges are not in flames

and I am not in my dotage.

All the time yesterday is good and today better –

an upward leading graph:

I told you this in a letter

in Russian and made you laugh,

claiming to be a noble, work-loving donkey

who carried the noblest load,

none of these poems I would unkey

though they are not in your abode.

My poems are an iceberg phenomenon,

only the tips are above the sea,

their distribution is nominal

but one day they’ll be for all to see.

21 February 2002

ON MUSE LED POETRY

When the Muse fuses with the loved one,

should she be discharged from work?

Is there a conflict of interests?

Do feelings come between them?

The Muse is on 24 hour duty...

WORKING WITH JOHN RUNDLE

‘He is one of the most serious

cases we have ever seen’.

Silent in a world of his own

but his wife told the tale

of his falls and fits.

After two weeks of tegritol

he came back calmer –

no falls no fits.

Next to fit

him for hearing aids.

When a man is destroyed,

an iron bar to the head,

there is little that can be done.

The little girl was not there:

the family interpreter.

The reward was simple:

a smile on the lips of his wife.

*

I am in the same pub where I wrote 9 poems in a row.

I should be at an Iranian poetry reading

but in the end I didn’t want to go,

not that anything is bleeding

but I find myself a little slow.

John Heath Stubbs is reading

on Sunday at Torriano,

I’ll make that my exception –

I couldn’t say no.

‘I will tell you of the deep sea’

I want to savour our first book together,

not to rush on to the next.

How many layers of boot leather

did I wear out to put the poems in context.

I carried you with me in my pocket,

or rather your blue book,

I plugged myself into your socket

of energy and the power took

me into a heavenly kingdom

somewhere above the earth

where angels were singing

and inspiration giving birth.

I want to savour our first book together,

not to rush on to the next.

25 February 2002

Recently, milaya, I have sent you less e-mails

and you have sent me none.

I have not been mealy-mouthed

and occasionally we have verbal fun.

The minutes tick by. The lines race,

no time for a funeral pace.

I write on the hoof in whatever place,

poems attempting to capture your grace.

I will finish this poem in a trice,

with its words I could entice,

laughter spiced

with more than niceties.

Words are not our only ties.

Truth, truth where lie no lies.

25 February 2002

POEM WITH THE ADOLESCENTS’ GROUP

And the whole room is writing

at the tables under the neon lighting,

writing down before and after

the session punctuated by laughter.

They write about Africa, Afghanistan, Kosovo:

the concentration carries over

into the silence of the room,

but the past is more than a tomb.

See it rises before our eyes

out of the blue skies,

is our life a disguise,

is poetry exciting these guys?

Now in the new life the past dies

like on this page these lines.

25 February 2003

FOR GILL HINSHELWOOD

I  write poems but don’t publish them,

I give them a long prison term,

without rights of correspondence

their sentence becomes silence.

I know the confines of solitude,

the constant struggle for fortitude,

the mentality of the informer

broken under vicious torture.

They defile the body beautiful,

the temple of the soul

and you Gill are dutiful

to reconstruct the whole.

The extraction of information in torture interrogations

is the reverse of your MF sessions.

27 February 2002

The thyroid gland is like a butterfly

a bowtie around the neck.

Mine went hyper utterly,

sweats, shaking, anxiety, oh heck.

But you had stored up for me happiness

and I found a new-found zappiness,

lost 10 kilos and did not mind

my racing pulse: is it not a sign

of being in love? Picking at my food,

disappearing into daydreams

of you, still being the interpreter like Robin Hood

and plotting poems’ schemes

with the arrows of words

not aimed at flying birds

but the winged languages.

I no longer care upon my word

about the difference in our ages.

27 February 2002

FOR REZA’S BIRTHDAY

Little brother in poetry,

your fingers always on the guitar strings,

here in English I’ll try

to write a poem like a song sings.

Shiraz is only a wine in England

to those who don’t know,

but to us it’s a poetry capital singled

out like Khayyam’s wine bowl.

In London Persian poets in exile

are in a great majority

and, Reza, your poems will wait a short while

till they find their words’ authority.

I have no doubt at this birthday feast

that poems are the fermenting yeast

that will foment the wild wine,

that will in essence be yours, ours and mine.        2 March 2002

At home with the Persian dancing

which being interpreted is ‘raks’

I wasn’t about to be chancing

comments on your black slacks.

It reminds me I’ve never seen your legs,

you always wear trousers or long skirts.

On your body nothing sags,

especially your tight black and white shirt.

So these poems are a secret,

for whose eyes alone?

If you can fly with the eaglet

how can you settle with the drone?

Secrecy means withholding,

holding back from holding.

3 March 2002

POEM IN ADOLESCENTS’ GROUP

Friendship is international,

unlike love it is rational,

it is in peace and action

and is the most human reaction.

A friend on speed

is not a friend indeed.

A book is a friend you read

as is a flower seed.

A friend is a ship

who carries you in her hold

the whole of life’s trip

if you are weak or bold.

4 March 2002

FOR BERIVAN

For how many years

Beri have you been in the business

of conquering fears,

busy interpreting at the Foundation?

You came with a refugee’s foundation

escaping across the Kurdish mountains,

guiding your sons to safety.

You found the London tube most scary.

We met for many years here

in the staff room: your mane of red hair,

your powerful, beautiful frame

and what jokes we had in Farsi,

Arabic and even English.

My one word of Kurdish is ‘spas’

and it seems appropriate now –

I know why my tears flow

this early morning but I can interpret

the interruption of our work

together as for the best.

You will take many memories

from MF of bookings and clients,

case workers and interpreters’ meetings.

Of course we never actually worked together

but the basic problems were similar

and we lived for those successful sessions.

Now those sixty minute sessions

and longer are coming to an end

but friendship and loyalty never end,

ultimately my only Kurdish word

communicates it all: ‘spas’ my friend.

8 March 2002

ABI HAYAT* FOR LEYLA

The water you gave me

from the  fridge

was called ‘life’ in Turkish .

We had talked thyroid

symptoms – hyper of course.

Would radioactive iodine save me?

Would I again climb the ridge

then walk down to the finish

and out again onto the highroad

of my life’s course?

You can’t fall in love on Carbimazole,

she said, and I felt somehow not whole,

but I like this Zaza girl

and my life still can spin and whirl.

10 March 2002

* Water of Life

A headache developing.

This morning I saw a fluid

jagged line in the air.

Nazim Hikmet  is not all enveloping.

There’s space left for the Celtic Druid,

Judaeo-Christianity and Islam’s flare.

War in Israel and Palestine,

Afghanistan, soon perhaps Iraq.

It screws up the intestines

and makes your lower back ache.

From blows to the head it gives you epilepsy

and feeds you Western lines of coke and ecstasy

till you are oh so hyper-hyper,

like the flitting tongue of a viper.

*

I am having breakfast or Turkish kahvalti

and thinking of Mimi Khalvati.

If I could  write like Mimi

and Mimi could write like me,

our Is would cross but we’d not be cross:

and it would be the world’s gain not loss.

If I could write like Stephen Watts

and Stephen could write like me

we would never miss the plots

and the world would be lava quartz.

If I could write like Nathalie Handal

and she could write like me,

for words we’d never have to panhandle

and our emotions would run free.

If I could translate Richard McKane

and I could write like me

there’d be no saccharine sugar cane,

we’d be high on cubes of poetry.

11 March 2002

Quicksilver, Mercurial words paint the exotic,

not Rousseau’s jungles or Quixotic

tilting at windmills, more Sancho Panza on his peasant donkey

plodding inexorably, foot after hoofed foot, but with a bunch of keys

at my belt to unlock the locks of poetry.

Facing your extra-terrestrial lines I feel pedestrian

yet still I made them my own, though you are equestrian,

daughter of Mars, riding high, side-saddle

and I flex my translator’s muscles

pump up my red blood corpuscles,

escape the poems from no prison cells

into this spring day’s clear light.

I hope we will always see I to I

though I walk and you ride.

12 March 2002

There is no freedom in secret-winged poems

if they cannot alight in your home,

if they cannot be read by the intended reader.

It’s like internal bleeding.

The blood of the printer ink disappears

in file and notebook and there are fears

of them resting there for umpteen years.

But they are all within the bounds of friendship

though they are full of true love,

like a tug tugs the big ship

into the safety of the harbour cove.

On April 5th your birthday

our parallel lines will berth

as we launch forth –

our book.

12 March Tollis Cafe

Wriggling and trembling like an eel,

the arms, hands and fingers,

it must be a mighty feeling

that this person has engendered.

Would I suffer from Parkinsonians if interviewed by Parkinson?

I am famous for translating from the dark prisons

of Turkey and the former Soviet Union.

To cry I need no onion:

every day I interpret testimony

and earn my daily money

testing my tolerance for torture

but in the evenings I sought to

communicate by e-mail with Rod in Cali Colombia,

Negar in London and Nathalie sometime in California.

13 March 2002

Like a skin diver heading for the surface,

bubbles trailing from his snorkel,

time and again I dive to return and expel

the air and take another lungful.

I was ducking and diving and duckdiving

long years ago in the Mediterranean,

those times the fish were thriving,

terror didn’t rule the terrain.

Now my lungs are tarred by pipe smoking,

my breathing comparatively constricted and short.

I wish I’d been able to have broken

the habit but I am trapped and caught.

Now I dive in the sea of poetry

and visualize a coral tree.

13 March 2002

SEASCAPE

The rocky cove not the beach,

this is the dictum I teach,

perhaps I could almost reach

back to this idyll of my youth.

Cyclops mask donned,

snorkel and flippers on –

I am not conned:

the sea is my truth.

Oktay Rifat observed this ritual,

speared fish became his victuals,

this reality is true not virtual,

25 years later I translate him with Ruth.

15 March 2002

You are soon to be in Baku

and I will not go cuckoo

but like our e-mail doves I’ll coo,

though you may rarely visit the dovecote.

Forgive me if I skirt round the health issue,

it’s not time to pass the tissues,

I can withstand life and death pressures:

there are bigger things in this world to cry about.

In Baku there’ll be an award for our book,

I wish I could see how you’ll look,

in black I bet, with you I forsook

depression and sadness – they’re out.

We are more this couplet than a couple

but our words are beautiful in parallel.

15 March 2002

Maide said: ‘I will always remember

the smile she put on your face.

One day you may love her, one day hate her,

but I will always remember

the smile she put on your face.’

No hate, how could I, my face

still smiles as I think of her far away.

17 March 2002

Sitting in the Tube next to my daughter –

we’d walked at speed to catch it.

If I could only hatch it

this plan and I really ought to.

It is a New and Selected Poems

that I’ll compile for John Rety.

It was the idea of James Thackara

on hearing of my health problems.

Just some more time, some more time

with you and you – I am in my prime.

Shall I play the charade

and not talk but that too is hard:

I want that camaraderie

and have it with you my Dears.

17 March 2002

POEM FOR LUCY’S BIRTHDAY

‘Our fate mirrors the world’s’ Nazim Hikmet

The passing of age is measured by birthdays

but you defy that code –

you don’t seem to count in earthly days,

to me you never seem to grow old.

The knocks that imprisoned writers

receive have a knock on effect on us,

there’s always somewhere where the walls are tighter,

but today it’s over you we make a fuss.

As you guide the Writers in Prison Committee,

emphatically without the syndrome of Walter Mitty,

you show your reserves of sympathy and pity –

oh dear this poem is turning into a ditty.

Recently you met Hikmet in Ruth’s and my translation,

may he too, good centenarian, give you Birthday elation.

17 March 2002

His hands he clutched

over his crutch

and I knew

he had been hit there.

It’s given to few

to grasp physical torture

and to fewer torture of the soul.

Today that Doctor and I treated the whole.

Electric shocks

become nightmare shocks.

The torturers are set in stone,

they may crack the skull and bones,

but it’s inside the damage is done.

Once another and I said we’d suck out the poison

drop by drop – and spit it out,

and the vet’ within weeks brought it all out

and reeling we reeled in the perpetrators

for they are the true world traitors.

19 March 2002

African boys often spell torture ‘torcher’

as though it torches their mind and bodies.

Abidin, Hikmet’s friend, said I should keep

an interpreter’s diary, but none of us do.

And I write these words from a vivid memory

that will never be expunged,

for I translate the words of survivors and case workers:

they both speak through me and for 5 hours a day I’m theirs.

So my words are taken from me but I am far from silent

and I must concentrate like hell as I enter the human Hell

and hold back the tears that interpret tears

and strive well with words to make the survivor well.

19 March 2002

The mind empties into the lines,

thoughts become words, images become signs

that mark the track of the poem,

so that picking up pebbles it returns home.

Hansel is leading Gretel,

the rose of youth is scattered red petals,

but knighthood lasts to beyond middle age

and the hand that held the lance still writes the page.

Round tables are for discussion and dining

and still friends and lovers are pining

for each other. At noon as I write I see my day declining

as yours in the east sets and I am designing

for your birthday a presentation of white wild roses

to give to you as this poem closes.

*

Once I saw the Caspian Sea

in Iran in 1966.

You’re perched on the eastern side.

I wonder: ‘How’s tricks?’

You are my friend, my pride.

I break for a  cup of tea.

The Chinaman told you to drink boiled water.

I hope our healths will never falter.

25 March 2002

My poetry is not prophecy,

I know it’s not prophetic,

but it’s like an iceberg in the sea,

deep but not bathetic.

It can cause all sorts of panic,

psychotically it sank the Titanic

and caused innumerable wars

but really its notes settling scores.

25 March 2002

That old feeling

of nicotine coursing

in the bloodstream.

Slim as a Coldstream

guard my stomach has disappeared

as long ago I had speared

a grouper and returned

to the surface, fat burned.

28 March 2002

That old feeling

of nicotine coursing

in the bloodstream.

Slim as a Coldstream

guard my stomach has disappeared

as long ago I had speared

a grouper and returned

to the surface, fat burned.

28 March 2002

SLATE ODE

Hyperthyroid can create anxiety

but if anything mine has diminished.

The poets I translate I regard with piety

from Akhmatova to Tarkovsky to Negar, I wish,

a span of a score years and fifteen

and if anything with words I am more nifty

now I am well over fifty

than when I started at this craft at eighteen.

The returns are great and accumulate,

the wealth though will come when I’m Richard the late,

as for now let’s put it on the slate.

28 March 2002

EASTER PLEASANT MUSINGS

You cannot leave me now

for we have never been together.

Then why do I feel abandoned and how

do I almost feel flayed and tanned like leather?

Perhaps then we were together?

Fool not yourself Richard –

put it down to persistent summer weather,

to Khayyam’s virtual wine pitcher.

If then I am not left

the Muse and I can still get together

and I can deftly slip into inspiration’s cleft

lying on the springy heather.

So this Easter pleasant

I’ll settle for the future in the present.

28 March 2002

A headache developing.

This morning I saw a fluid

jagged line in the air.

Nazim Hikmet  is not all enveloping.

There’s space left for the Celtic Druid,

Judaeo-Christianity and Islam’s flare.

War in Israel and Palestine,

Afghanistan, soon perhaps Iraq.

It screws up the intestines

and makes your lower back ache.

From blows to the head it gives you epilepsy

and feeds you Western lines of coke and ecstasy

till you are oh so hyper-hyper,

like the flitting tongue of a viper.

The mind empties into the lines,

thoughts become words, images become signs

that mark the track of the poem,

so that picking up pebbles it returns home.

Hansel is leading Gretel,

the rose of youth is scattered red petals,

but knighthood lasts to beyond middle age

and the hand that held the lance still writes the page.

Round tables are for discussion and dining

and still friends and parted are pining

for each other. At noon as I write I see my day declining

as yours in the east sets and I am designing

for your birthday a presentation of wild roses

to give to you as this poem closes.

LONDON WAITING

The sinking stomach loses me weight

and all I can do is wait

for tests, for money, for you.

But I still know that the truth is true,

and the words come out on cue.

Wheelchair bound years ago I met Nolan, the poet, at Kew.

A lot of plants have grown since then, including the yew,

whose little red berries poison the cattle

and in Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan they are doing battle.

2-3 April 2002

Tired all day after the event.

Perhaps tiredness gave vent

to our disappointment,

but the reading went

so well and you loved your present,

so something was heaven-sent.

In my speech I voiced my resentment

and I had had a presentiment

that people would be absent.

Still we pitched the first book’s tent

and with it we are more than content.

6 April 2002

This morning I am listening to music on Radio 3,

the bombardment of 4 News was getting me down:

why from dawn should I wear a frown

on my mind and make my soul less free.

‘We end this programme with operetta’,

they’re pouring out their passion in the rose garden.

I’m losing weight, my stomach hardens,

perhaps one day I’ll get her,

though who she’ll be, to be frank, I’m not certain:

I just know this is not the final curtain.

The operetta voices sing and don’t annoy,

in these poems I’ll play another ploy:

I’ll be writing for all of vous

and will not mention te or tu.

My father worked in counterespionage,

also grew potatoes, leeks and spinach.

(Milder variant:

My father was in the civil service,

also grew potatoes, leeks and lettuce.)

He was called Mac and HQ

and grew tomatoes and cues.

Distant at one remove

he rarely showed his feelings

but the words he said in his final move

to death years later leave me reeling.

‘I know you have been afraid of me all your life.’

‘I admire the work you do at the MF.’

‘Friends are different from family.’

‘It’s all funny ha-ha not peculiar.’

‘I am going on an adventure.’

‘I see Andrew at the end of a long alley,

he’s throwing up his arms and saying:

“The old bugger’s coming!”‘

As I left him for that last time I said:

‘Have a great adventure.’

7 April 2002

Farewell again, my friend,

there will never be a journey’s end.

To you I lean and lend

my spirit without inhibition.

These Rubais to you I won’t send

though they’re pure and innocent.

Long hours I’ve spent

for you in composition.

I’ve never got incensed

with you, but I feel censured

by someone else’s presence,

though I understand the position.

So in secrecy’s tense

situation I sense

a slender recompense

in these poems’ expedition.

8 April 2002

The silence is when I know you’re still there.

The poignant desire to stroke your hair

which always comes to me when you are far away.

I don’t feel like going out to a reading or play,

just to sit in my study bedroom looking at two pictures by Paul Klee,

or throwing the poem on life’s wheel like a wedge of clay

and moulding it not into a pot but a vase

for unallowed flowers.

And if I cracked and expressed with full force

the love I feel for you – of course

it could blow our friendship off course –

you never see two horsemen on a horse.

It would be easy for me to be lazy

and play safe, but would it not be crazy

not to express the full diapason

like an organist’s fingers on the organ

evoke the full, all-consuming music’s passion.

Train Cardiff to London 11 April 2002

FOR NIGEL OSBORNE

I translate Russian women’s poetry into my baritone.

I feel the pulse, the cycle, the feminine tone,

the breathing in the breast, hair flowing loose to which I am prone,

whether it’s Akhmatova, Sedakova or Ratushinskaya writing in

                                                                              the ‘Small Zone’

they breathe their poems into me, alone

at my writer’s table. Shut, the phone,

off, the computer. We are in a world of our own,

more like a sculptor in a studio chipping with a chisel at stone.

See, the hours have flown by.

The tip of the chisel, the nib of the pen – no longer lonely,

recreating the pulse, the cycle, the female tone.

12 April 2002

WATERLOO STATION

I like these stations with their bustle of humanity,

each person will die at a different time into infinity.

I sit at the Café table with umbrella by a stunted palm

and think of poet friends Mimi, Bejan, Negar, Ziba and Parm

and Tanzi, Richard Blackford’s

pianist on the train from Cardiff

and there are no buts or ifs,

just the yoking word ‘and’

and this poem is fated and planned.

13 April 2002

FOR FAHRIYA

She said ‘Did you fall in love’

and I said ‘Yes’ – confession time.

She continued: ‘The feeling is above

the outcome,’ like the line is over the rhyme.

The couplet is above the coupling,

the latter is common, the former rare.

Into my former life I stare,

peopling my pupils’ vision with my eyes open

and I am in control of what will happen

like a man in harmony with fate

knowing that no poem, no meeting is too late.

13 April 2002

The internal clock with its chimes of rhyme,

its own pulse rate keeping time

is more sophisticated than any chronometer.

It knows all the six feet of a hexameter

the beat and span of amphibrach and dactyl

that I can no longer scan.

Perhaps I am a pterodactyl

rather than a dinosaur

for I can fly so high in poems – more,

and I could be threatened with largactil

if I show my exuberance to the wrong person.

13 April 2002

(To the tune of ‘Sitting in the dock of the bay’)

Sitting on the Reading train,

remembering how they abuse my name:

I’ve been called Michael Caine,

McVain and even Cockaine,

so I’m sitting on the Reading train

taking the strain off McKane.

13 April 2002

THE INHERITANCE, FOR LEAH FRITZ

Perhaps aggro is inherent in inheritance

when the money is not of Lottery vintage.

Money need not be an irritant

if you get it at the right age.

My interest has never been in Interest

and gain in percentage;

I need food, a roof, books, forget the rest,

but perhaps I’d like to line my daughter’s nest

with more than these lines, worthless

in financial terms but valuable nonetheless –

and your inheritance.

POEM FOR THE TORRIANODORES

I don’t intend to throw bull into the ring

and I hope no phobile moans will ring.

I don’t know whether to entertain or move you,

but I believe laughter through tears can’t be beaten,

the Russian sort, not from the playing fields of Eton.

Of wounds and traumata I would talk but not to wound you,

I’ve sucked out the poison of torture in words

in three tongues and every time it still hurts

but my suffering as Peter Levi said is luminous

and I believe the correct philosophical term is numinous.

The Torrianodore takes the bull by the horns,

struggles him to the ground pacifistically.

The picadors vie to publish poems with Picador

and the Hearing Eye roves mystically,

seeing all, hearing all, never petty,

troubadouring the name of John Rety.

15 April 2002

When your regular Kurdish beggar

outside the entrance to Borough Tube

offers YOU money:

it’s deep friendship in the depths.

*     *     *

FOR JULIET

Recently we have been talking at night

before you go to sleep.

I like to see the fight

in you and your immense leaps

in character almost overnight.

It is a difficult period: no depression

but financial imbalance.

Interpreting for everyone including Gillian Ballance

is on the decrease. My impression

is we will weather the storm.

My e-mail correspondents are warm

and no more remote than the terminal of my computer.

Successes outweigh disappointments – I impute her

in ability to get my e-mails to press of events

and the Second Book’s advent is an excitement:

the translations are intense – a new departure.

McKane is able – a pox on Geoffrey Archer.

You’re back, but somehow it’s not the same,

though there is no wedge between us.

The poems are far from lame,

we saw them and they’ve seen us,

looking off the page with their black type

into our eyes: see they’ve been us.

Now our book needs a hype.

23 April 2002

TO THE TUNE OF ‘EXPERIENCE’ BY

MARK LEVENTHALL SUNG BY ALICIA

Capitalism, capitalism, Capitolism,

Communism, communism, Con you ism.

Blair declares new labour,

Conservatives try to belabour.

Capitalism: it’s too late.

Communism, see your fate.

(Experience)

Christianity, Islam they’re another ism,

Pornography, jism – another ism.

Capitalism: capitulate.

Flower children: copulate.

Communism: it’s far too late.

(Experience)

23 April 2002

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big one.’

Archilochus

With poems I try to please the Muse

and I write them so no one can accuse

me of anthropomorphising her.

Misanthropy, misogyny I never offer

and these lines add widows’ mites to my coffer.

So it will not fly the fur,

the fox will not be savaged by the cur

and the hedgehog will be safe in his burrow

and I will live this summer out in Borough.

23 April 2002

Michael, for that was his name,

given as we shook hands after five stops

on the Silver Link, this morning train,

said he was not intelligent

as I told him of breakdowns and my lithium brain.

We were two real gentle men

talking about golf and garfish in Portugal,

not about women or gals.

He had two swigs from his cider

and talked about caddying

for sixpences and threepenny bits

and playing with an American friend

who shot below his age.

We talked about golf, intelligence and humanity,

how the latter was on the wane.

I guess I’ll never see that Irishman again.

24 April 2002

FOR DEREK

Not quite summer, no fields about,

the psychiatrist who does not shout

yet delivers conversation with clout.

I told him of the milk-stealing lout.

I’m drinking milky tea, not Murphy’s stout,

my frame the good side of stout.

In childhood Andrew and I fished for trout.

These days I write unerringly without doubts

on themes I then knew nothing about.

It’s over the hyperthyroid bout.

Extra money I have nowt.

Let the words riot and rout

but I’ll discipline them into line

before I finally sign out.

25 April 2002

ROCK ON THE TUBE

And suddenly the whole Tube escalator

was playing rock, paper, scissors,

banging their fists on the rubber runner

and I was winning every time.

Beautiful girls were giving me paper –

I cut them up with scissors.

Fist clenched on a count of three

I remained a tight fisted rock,

the young man in the business suit

gliding towards me didn’t go paper.

An Afghan, drilling me in the eyes,

blunted his scissors on my rock.

I became champion of the Angel escalator,

my craze is escalating on all the lines.

Bluff people try the double bluff,

women stare you down.

It may be a one off –

you’ll never meet again,

but I recommend scissors, paper, rock

when you’re next on the escalator,

whether you’re going up or down.

26 April 2002

FOR MY FRIEND GILLIAN BALLANCE

My God we worked well together that long, long day.

We can say that for we are older and you are going on holiday.

You go to Mull if your brother’s wife does not die

and of course I would share responsibility if we had a client suicide.

I am not quite your voice only, for you give generously

your interpreters their own words, uniquely

at the Foundation. Remember when I said ‘We’ve lost him’

as dramatic as in ET’s near death scene,

yet next session we reeled him back

and how jubilant we are when they come back on track

our kids who so often lose the plot,

cunningly plotted against, always one step from tragedy.

I throw the book, the lot

at their torturers, the rapists, the perpetrators

for they are the true traitors.

I hone my words to work with the harvest of smiles,

laughter and tears. These live sessions

with you are never boring: for some reason

we run the gauntlet, accept the challenge,

risk takers in an advanced age,

quite wise but fundamentally more doulally,

more eccentric, off centre than all:

but our knowledge of craziness is our ally.

Your surname is not a bad name for a therapist,

every hour we know what lies in the balance:

we have shed all excess ballast

to lighten their load. Here we are, two white-haired persons

in the triangle living, loving our work till the last

syllable of interpreted, of recorded time.

29 April 2002

‘These are dark, dark times

and I have been feeling very sad.’ Nathalie H.

I would end these lines with rhymes

and the poetry would come out not bad

and perhaps it would be not too trite:

politically I could not change the world

but for you this poem may come out emotionally right,

this, written for you unusually in the day not the night

to clothe you like a warm black cloak

of the unknown that no rain would soak,

for today you are anonymous, my dear,

though you are in Palestine or Israel I fear.

2 May 2002

He was in my dream

encouraging me to do headstands.

Now I think I can understand

the symbolism of this scene,

for headstands soothe the thyroid.

For months I have not been paranoid

and even the poetry is not schizoid.

I write poems but don’t send them out,

I avoid the florid flout.

When flowers die they’re thrown out,

but I press these poems between

my notebook’s pages.

4 May 2002

FOR STEPHEN WATTS: FROM AN INTERPRETER

AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

The ache and impact on the bone

of the cranium that interpreting for the tortured can make.

The differentiation of tone

that an interpreter takes

into her or his consideration.

Distress is common, more rare elation,

in the voice apprehension,

in the vocal chords tension:

you see – all this before a word is spoken!

Then why are we sometimes considered outside to be a token?

And as for books – people think translations drop from the sky,

when in fact it’s more like threshing and winnowing rye,

separating the grain from the chaff in every word,

guarding against appearing culturally absurd.

The diaspora writers will die received as poorer

without a translator or writing in the new language –

but you cannot have two mothers or hence two mother tongues,

though now they are talking also about the father tongue.

Different languages are breathed by the same lungs

but the air of exile tastes different

as does the bread made from Ruth’s alien corn.

It’s hard enough in any language to be coherent

in writing, but it’s important to stumble:

in making mistakes the laughter, even ridicule

adds inevitably to the learning process.

Yet translation can lead to success:

five out of six of John Berger’s

favourite books are translations.

He may be unique Nabokov

but of interpreters there is a flock of

them, but beware the rogue interpreter

even more than the bad translator.

How easy to distort the words!

The other two in the triangle

on every false word unknowingly dangle.

The rogue interpreter is rarely caught,

his ‘language skills’ can only be bought.

The diaspora writers are a granary of literature

for the years to come. In the near future

I see them getting across their cultures

in collaboration, teaming up the old and the young

yet in a brotherhood, a sisterhood of tongues.

2 May 2002

Richard McKane has interpreted Turkish and Russian for the last 14 years at

the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. His recent poetry

and translations are in Poet for Poet (Hearing Eye), Nazim Hikmet co-

translated with Ruth Christie (Anvil) and On Wings Over the Horizon Poems

of Negar (Russian and English, Anglo-Caspian)

Unreasonably tired on the train,

unseasonably mired by the rain.

*         *         *

Down from the high of the mountain peak

into the flat plains of the organism.

Slowed down the metabolism.

Now words don’t speak.

Or up from the depths too fast means embolism,

bubbles in the blood, a dose of the bends.

So from the monde du silence

into the silent deimpression chamber

to decompress this poet down.

Is this how the poem ends?

Am I still breathing?

8 May 2002

Anxiety is having a full bladder,

is climbing childhood’s tall ladder

to clear with a bamboo the gutter

and the speech mechanism starting to stutter.

Stammering has been treated with haloperidol

successfully – the researchers deserve a halo.

I’ll remember that if I say h-h-hello,

oh, some interpreters are such dolls.

I’m sitting my full bladder out

for this poem’s sake:

the world is madder outside.

The root ‘pis’ in Russian makes

the words ‘piss’ and ‘write’

with a simple stress change.

10 May 2002

FOR FUNDA AND TANIA

You’ve had a headache for 4 weeks,

yet yesterday we did our best work.

Our three heads of hair

were discussed in detail,

yours, centimetres of ringlets cut off

and a reperm of your black hair;

Tania’s beautiful gold also lost inches

and she described mine as ‘luny’,

white like her father’s.

Why did this seem to be the best therapy

in that small room that is so ours,

ours for the tears that sparkled

as Tania thanked us,

ours to destroy the syringe that pricked her,

to talk about the torture there, the torment here,

our own little desert island.

Every time we gather driftwood words

and warm our hearts and souls

by the fire’s eternal flame.

11 May 2002

Sweating in early summer in my green sweater,

a bottle of Amé and one of Evian water.

My pipe discarded in the ashtray.

At this Café I can wash away

the troubles of the interpreter’s day:

a boat has slipped its anchor from the quay

of a Greek island into the broad blue yonder,

and if anything I am fonder of her than ever.

11 May 2002

FOR MEHMET AND ALL AT THE ARCOLA THEATRE

In the area, kebabs grilled on charcoal:

Arcola, Arc ola, Arc olé!

Turkish Kahvalti from Cafe Latte?

The rainbow arc, the loading ark,

the theatre’s expectant dark.

From a ragtrade sweatshop

converted to plays non-stop,

from Shakespeare to Soho,

the word is out, so go!

12 May 2002

THE WEATHER REPORT

Cloudy, drizzle, sun only behind thick cloud

promoting a shallow depression.

I can’t read my poems out loud,

mustn’t create the wrong impression.

The weather is overcast,

last night I cast over not the last

declaration of love not war

formalising again in words

what I’d skirted round before.

I think it was Baudelaire

who wrote about raining in the heart.

Perhaps I should hibernate in my lair

and never give this poem a kick start,

then I remember your grey brain under your black hair,

placed so tight in your skull’s carapace,

and the rain stops: see Two Suns flare.

13 May 2002

The Mediterranean is a pool of blue

in my memory,

that I can conjure up at will.

Perhaps I too

am Mediterranean – of its fruits I’ve had my fill.

Olives in their millions, figs, melons

and water melons

dig their root-talons

into the dry earth.

For once forget the oil

and honour the soil.

Of desalinated water there could be gallons,

when the sweet waters cover the sea.

14 May 2002

Somewhere in a small room nearby your are working.

I don’t know whether you are Russianing or Turking.

I wonder what problems you are facing,

your languages are mates to mine.

It is not the problems linguistic,

more those of poetry than logistics,

to be more specific

it is not the words but the line.

In interpreting the words don’t rhyme,

there just is not the time,

but there are tell-tale signs

that show that words are symbolistic.

Whether dream or nightmare the session

lasts for an hour and who is the oracle in possession

of the answers? No one in this triangle.

Is the therapist consulted for counsel?

14 May 2002

I above all cannot play the ruse

of writing a book on aruz.

My poems rhyme but without meter

and yes I meet poets him or her

who wouldn’t dream of going to bed with rhyme,

and here comes time-honoured time

to deflect me to this word play

to consummate the lay but not the lay,

to berth the ship of poetry by the harbour quay,

until the next poem these are the last words I’ll say.

14 May 2002

I, once ex of this sceptred isle,

now claim the status of internal exile,

not like an expat gives himself a pat on the back

as he swills his Gordon’s gin back,

but like a shortsighted mole in his Borough burrow

shelved with Russian and Turkish books that can be borrowed.

I live as much in these two cultures as in their languages

and believe that reading is one of the gauges

of cultural personality. So I claim it: asylum

within four walls, lined with the poetries I love.

15 May 2002

A GLIMPSE OF N.

I have been phased out all day,

as though in a deep prepoem reverie.

This is still forever me

but intrusive thoughts may be on their way.

One glimpse of you in the corridor:

this is no corrida, I’m no matador

but I would take the bull by the horns

and praise lovingly the day you were born.

For the first time in months I’m almost feeling forlorn

but I cut the grass of this poem’s lawn,

trimming the grass blades with the mower blades

in the garden which my parents made.

But more, good memories of you make me swoon

and let me sing my way out of melancholy’s tune.

15 May 2002

What does it mean to be a Muse-led poet,

does it really mean my poems are dictated?

Or does it rather mean She inspires,

She creates the feeling, kindles the fires?

I’m told She’s different from my Friend and friends,

that it’s not to me alone she sends

Her inspiration, that She is eternal, will not end

when my own life comes to an end.

I would give her life in abundance,

for she knows everything already about words’ dances.

I will not recognise her in the street by chance.

She is the secret one, no need to seek her out, hence

though she is not Woman we have an unwritten contract

where the tip of the pen leaves on paper its ink track.

15 May 2002

In a lifetime how many hours

does a poet spend writing?

More or less than a soldier fighting?

But there’s a world of difference in their action and powers.

16 May 2002

I was just thinking of you...
thinking of how special you are and how
wonderful it is to have you in my life...
love always
nat

FOR NATHALIE

Your little Hi coo sending love

flew into my dovecote like a dove.

Rested, I let it fly around my room

before holding it to my breast.

We will have children poems together,

will communicate in the high ether.

Pushkin himself blessed our meeting,

he also knew about non-meetings.

It is just possible to be happy

while the world is out of joint.

Friendship love fills the vacuum,

is more and more to the point.

Here, receive this sonnet for your night haiku,

my nightingale sings, rather than the cuckoo.

17 May 2002

 

Hey, brother can you spare me a line?

Scavenging for cigarette butts in the old tube trains,

going northbound on the Northern line,

two young men, my brother and I, train

our eyes on the smoking carriage floor:

this was the lowest of my lows in London.

17 May 2002

ADVICE FOR SOMEONE GOING INTO TRANSLATION*

*The title and a certain tone of the poem reflects Nazim Hikmet’s poem ‘Advice for Someone Going Into Prison’

First, select your writer then read him or her thoroughly,

find a friend as consultant, make a list of vocabulary.

Campaign for your poet if they’re in prison, persecuted,

in the War Zone or Small Zone, for this too is the art of translation.

March their poems out like peace demonstrators,

as David McDuff and others with Ratushinskaya

or Sarah Maguire with Zakaria Mohammed,

holed up, beleaguered at home in Ramallah.

Take liberties in translation only when the risks are justified,

for ultimately ‘the language will judge’,

as Peter Levi said. Retranslate the classics,

but only look at your precursors at the end of the process,

then declare if you steal a word or ‘happy phrase’.

Write notes at the back or foot:

this is an original part of the work.

Surf the waves of centenaries.

Each new translation should be greener than the last.

Work slowly, or work fast –

you will establish a rhythm

that will become your template.

Use the best dictionary in the language:

this though expensive is your stonemason’s trowel.

Read your versions aloud – doing that is a test

that will save embarrassment later

when you read them in public.

Don’t fixate on a word, consult and glide on,

be mobile and come back to it later.

When you feel the pain in the words,

be grateful, for the writer suffered

it for you, for us; and know that

a love poem is a singular gift

to you the translator: to open,

admire and give on to the reader.

Yours are the words, yet the words are the poet’s.

You are creating, not just communicating.

If publication is your aim the labour

can be Sisyphean, rejections can abound.

You can’t climb on the back of even a famous poet.

With computer ready texts the word ‘vanity’ should vanish:

seek out self-publishing for instance in India.

Translate the poets you feel friendship for,

so they should feel less alone, less locked in their language.

Favour the bilingual book if possible, though

a minority will look at the left-hand page.

Remember an anthology from one language

could close down the field for other anthologies –

even your own – for as much as ten years:

so make it comprehensive if you can.

Revise the classics every twenty years –

they don’t change but your language does.

The original is virtually immutable.

Different translations come and go, but remember

no one is able to write your own poetry.

In the same way as it is a compliment to the people

of a foreign language to speak it abroad or at home,

and it is appreciated, so the English culture is enriched by translation

into it. We dream and think in cultures as much as languages.

Say the word Akhmatova, the word Hikmet

and you bring to life a poet:

you cannot translate proper names.

What did Dante and Shakespeare mean

to Lozinsky and Pasternak in Stalin’s times?

Is interpreting older than the oldest profession

with its body language?

The Home Office interpreted interviews sometimes

remind asylum seekers of interrogations at home.

The voice at the end of the language link phone for the DHSS

may miraculously speak a too familiar

language of bureaucracy incomprehensible.

Exposure to a completely foreign language is exhausting.

I used to think that the more people who are learning

a language the easier it makes that language.

Minority languages are dying. The quality of

language is on the decrease. How vital then

to refresh languages with concepts

from other languages, rather than flatten them.

Rule Englishiana, Englishiana rules the world,

yet still we need to translate into English,

to make the alien word understandable:

the purposes are different: to catch out or approve

an asylum seeker at interview, to treat the tortured

with therapy and counselling, or to get across a novel or poem.

These are powerful roles performed by a singular minority.

Unfortunately minors are too often in the stressful position

of being family interpreters, yet you wouldn’t entrust

your life or living to a twelve year old doctor or nurse.

Perhaps literary translation remains

the best example of the global drive into English,

for the texts retain their foreign culture –

their evocative landscapes, cityscapes,

seascapes. Long live the Other, Hybridity,

as Reza Baraheni would say, or exoticism

as others mighty say. Our languages

are not tired: it is we in our tiredness

who are tiring others out with them. Fresh motifs, fresh ways

of saying things can come through translation.

The Kurdish saz poet Ashik Veysel who sang in Turkish

told me the old Turkish proverb in 1972:

three languages – three persons.

Richard McKane May 2002 London

FOR STEPHEN WATTS: FROM AN INTERPRETER

AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

The ache and impact on the bone

of the cranium that interpreting for the tortured can make.

The differentiation of tone

that an interpreter takes

into her or his consideration.

Distress is common, more rare elation,

in the voice apprehension,

in the vocal chords tension:

you see – all this before a word is spoken!

Then why are we sometimes considered outside to be a token?

And as for books – people think translations drop from the sky,

when in fact it’s more like threshing and winnowing rye,

separating the grain from the chaff in every word,

guarding against appearing culturally absurd.

The diaspora writers will die received as poorer

without a translator or writing in the new language –

but you cannot have two mothers or hence two mother tongues,

though now they are talking also about the father tongue.

Different languages are breathed by the same lungs

but the air of exile tastes different

as does the bread made from Ruth’s alien corn.

It’s hard enough in any language to be coherent

in writing, but it’s important to stumble:

in making mistakes the laughter, even ridicule

adds inevitably to the learning process.

Yet translation can lead to success:

five out of six of John Berger’s

favourite books are translations.

He may be unique Nabokov

but of interpreters there is a flock of

them, but beware the rogue interpreter

even more than the bad translator.

How easy to distort the words!

The other two in the triangle

on every false word unknowingly dangle.

The rogue interpreter is rarely caught,

his ‘language skills’ can only be bought.

The diaspora writers are a granary of literature

for the years to come. In the near future

I see them getting across their cultures

in collaboration, teaming up the old and the young

yet in a brotherhood, a sisterhood of tongues.

2 May 2002

Richard McKane has interpreted Turkish and Russian for the last 14 years at

the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. His recent poetry

and translations are in Poet for Poet (Hearing Eye), Nazim Hikmet co-

translated with Ruth Christie (Anvil) and On Wings Over the Horizon Poems

of Negar (Russian and English, Anglo-Caspian)

OLGA KHOSTOVA

MIGRATION

Either this is temporary, or, alas, it’s just desert.

I’m talking about exile, when you’re forgotten, small, fearful,

where you...

You accidentally walked off with my Russian women poets

in your handbag – so this is translation interruptus.

I won’t allow anyone to corrupt us:

this is art for art’s sake, heart for heart’s sake and don’t we know it;

like Mandelstam in his Voronezh exile, let’s pay ourselves top rates per line.

Was it of absent-mindedness a sign,

or was there in your act some volition,

some attachment forming with those young Russian poets’ renditions?

I sit here bereft of my work on those translations,

having walked speedily after you to the Tube station,

and am thrown back on my own resources,

though the Russian poets are always my tacit sources.

20 May 2002

AMPHORAE

Take me back to the Mediterranean

and to the undersea terrain,

to a climate not like this rainy one,

but where there are high mountains not plain plains.

Let my lady be with her lap top,

rather than Chekhov’s lap dog.

Give me one of these notebooks

and an adequate supply of felt-tip pens

and the tavernas have good cooks

and while the cocks crow let the hens

lay huge brown eggs and the grain go gold

and if I have to grow old,

let it be so that I am 100 year old wine in amphorae:

you have all so much to drink from me before I die.

20 May 2002

With his death, the gap my father left

only intensified the feeling that I was bereft

before and my mother said that she felt it ‘rather pathetic’

to write poems, unless one was in the highest poetic

bracket. What to do with these parents?

One is dead and by poems can’t

be reached, the other is alive

and won’t let the poems reach her.

Yet I don’t write for my own sweet self

or for therapy to boost my mental health.

I crave a reader and try to heed her or him

not by composing an Ancient and Modern hymn

but by joining the avant-garde

at the same time as fighting a rearguard

action for classic Russian poetry.

I will not let anyone axe down my tree

or ridicule me with adjectives like ‘pathetic’.

Read this invective and reject it,

that word I mean, and accept my poems in good faith.

After all only one of you is quick, the other is a wraith.

What then awaits us,

old age’s troubled quietus

and the enaction of inaction?

FOR JOHN McCARTHY

I said I’d wait till 7 o’clock for my young Russian women poets,

so I sit in this cafe and the line I tow it

and since you’ve not come with them I spin words into original poems.

The late evening light means no Ohms

are being consumed and one assumes several roles

in lyric poetry. The radio plays fleshless rock and roll

but then suddenly Van Morrison sings ‘Brown-eyed Girl’

and I think of John McCarthy and my head spins in a whirl

on the day when Helen’s MF successor has been announced

and I let the cat of memory pounce

on my computer mouse and forbid e-mails to bounce

back as they did from Colombia, Turkey and London.

Now it’s 7 o’clock, my waiting is done.

I return with not on

my shield of poems, not the Spartan, the Athenian.

20 May 2002

FOR MUSA AND EUGENE

Two hours to live before I take the Underground to Golders Green.

My daughter is finishing her degree at Goldsmith’s College.

I have chosen a felt-tip that’s green.

Talk tonight will not be of  quails’ eggs but prison porridge.

Eugene, Lucy, Sara, myself will be there

and a few more will make up the party,

all converging on your house in North Square,

to you Musa, the host, famous for your hospitality.

Despite the themes’ gravity:

writers imprisoned all over the world,

there will be a certain levity,

the light and the shade, the light and the heavy words.

There will be talk of the Russians, the Chechens, the Turks and the Kurds,

Afghanistan, Iran, international flashpoints,

Israel and Palestine, the clashpoints.

Our talk is not cheap, book-lined the world not just walls has ears;

tonight we will light candles not just in prayer,

our souls will be flickering there

in our voices and breathing

in conversation will create something

warm between us and we will leave,

some for long journeys, relieved

by sharing our grief, mirth and burdens.

20 May 2002

FOR MUSA AND EUGENE

I am at Golders Green in a pub called the Refectory.

Just twenty minutes to become reflectory

before bearing these poems to my friends.

You know how it is when every day seems to be the weekend

and the graph of happiness reaches off the paper?

Should I feel guilt in now letting words caper?

But my father at the end felt great mirth

and all around the earth, women are giving birth

while bombs explode, writers rot in prison.

All colours are needed to create the prism

and Recep’s picture shows a rainbow emerging from the bars

of his prison cell – so they give us the coloured lights

ahead to carry the torch for those who are isolated,

gated, penned behind the bars’ grate.

Ours to attempt to liberate

them and ourselves as they and we wait

for the inevitable when our weeks and years will end.

20 May 2002

THE LAKE

Again I saw the jagged line on a pool of watery light:

my left eye seems to give me not so much a hallucination

more a vision: I couldn’t call it a plight,

more a minor visual aberration.

I sat it out still watching the computer screen

and thought it was rather like the rippled lake I used to fish in,

by the Stouts Hill soccer playing fields so green.

Sitting or standing I did a lot of silent wishing.

McKane minor was caned four of the best for walking on the grass in sandals.

It was four decades and more before I met Negar and Nathalie Handal

and two decades or more before I’d marry Elizabeth

and dedicated to her poems of love and parting.

Life is less a lottery but still a tough bet

and I, late starter, am gradually starting

to sort it out with Muse-inspired poetry,

elusive, even quirky, in its personal allusions:

reader, bear with me, I do need your collusion.

21 May 2002

FOR SASHA TKACHENKO: ON FOOTBALL AND POETRY

If you’re going to tackle Sasha Tkachenko

as he sashays to the right and left,

forget about the goalkeeper Yevtushenko:

Sasha will score goals in the net.

His poems are green as turf,

as powerful as the surging surf.

From football to poetry

he retains formation’s symmetry.

His goal changed, not his goalposts,

now he runs Russian PEN and tonight we’re his hosts.

He is an international on the poetry scene,

an ‘underground bridge’ between

imprisoned writers and the outside,

accepting no balls or fouls, he is on their and our side.

21 May 2002

MACBETH @ THE ARCOLA

A thin man with a grey beard limped to the bar,

and this was this Jack Shepherd, the King?

It looked like he’d come on foot not in a car

and in his pockets there would be nothing.

Yet suddenly on the stage, all white knuckle,

a bundle of nervous presence,

fearful before his resourceful

spouse: it all began to make sense.

I sat at floor stage level.

Didn’t slip into phased out reverie,

Shakespeare was coming alive for me:

my multitudinous worries I sent to the devil.

And as the slaughter in Scotland ended

my mind wended

to Pasko* and Pasternak,

to Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan,

India and Palestine

and they came true the witches’ intestines

and the missile tests

and the whole bloody world incarnadine.

25 May 2002

* Grigory Pasko, imprisoned Russian writer and journalist who documented pollution of the Japanese sea by the Russian fleet with nuclear waste.

Unusual – days have gone past

since I last

wrote a poem. Prose intervened

but I am still weaned

on poetry.

31 May 2002

Did the pebbles from your Cypriot beach

hear our English and Turkish words each to each

as they lay on the table within easy reach

of earshot. Lucky the students you teach.

Lucky is Lucky your dog to have climbed to St Hilarion,

lucky indeed are the people who hear your hilarity.

And I see us aiming in poems for an accurate clarity

out of a mixture of languages and family carry-on.

Translating poetry – is it craft, graft or art?

I honour your generous decision to work

Cypriot Turkish poems into English: start

this hard labour of love you will not shirk.

The future is in no wise futile,

if only in words it is fertile.

1 June 2002

It is not yet twilight:

no need for candlelight.

Alone in the garden of the pub,

a pint of Guinness to hand

I think not of the troubled Pushkin Club

but of a beach with four missing pebbles

in some island still with troubles.

There the waves never really crash

like the breakers of the Atlantic.

I learnt how olives ripen before the crush.

I know the moonlight is romantic

there, but here it’s beyond sunset

and for my poetry the scene is set.

The Graves’ poem – my homework –

lies unfound in my room.

I had done a little interpreting work,

felt tired, slept without gloom.

Curious as to how your visit went:

this end of my day has been well spent.

1 June 2002

I don’t know where this poem will go:

so shall I let the rhymes sow

the lines, seeding these words?

Today I interpreted for a family of Kurds,

father, head bashed into epilepsy

now feeling giddy and tipsy

and down to 45 kilos.

Your eyes too have scanned these lines

and worked on how they were created

and why. I gave you my gorse spines

in Amphora and at RFH we were feted

with sandwiches about to be thrown away.

A difficult day, a man once imprisoned in Gebze,

the same prison as Asiye’s

had spooked me as I walked to the room to interpret

but I made a concerted effort to be in the room.

Six friends came up to us after the Russian concert

and tried speaking Russian to you

and the caterer said ‘I didn’t know you were Russian,

you’re welcome here anytime.’

OUR THEATRE: NAZIM HIKMET

One night, just one night for Nazim Hikmet.

Zafer, Nazan or Melike I had never met,

nor did I know before their myth

but I was assured that MIT did.

But despite the opening ideologies

I, shaking like a walnut tree leaf in Gulhane Park,

attempted in Turkish to deliver a eulogy

to Nazim’s belief that we carry prison within us.

It was a musical evening. Beside us

was Nazim’s spirit for in a dream John Berger

saw that he had spoken here

48 years ago in Red Lion Square:

(it sounded funny in Turkish).

When Melike sang Angina Pectoris

my heart raced, I broke out in a sweat

of recognition, my face grew florid,

whether I could stand this for long is a tough bet.

Nazim Hikmet laid himself open

to world events, they scarred his body and his heart.

After, privately, I mentioned Asiye Zeybek’s release and other PEN

writers in prison. This is only the start:

I’m oPENing out, Nazim is my guide,

and he claimed it was only to his women he lied.

7 June 2002

FOOTBALL 1

LET THIS CUP PASS NOT FROM US

The energy of yesterday spills over into the morning,

another day is dawning.

England 1, Argentina 0.

Nazim Hikmet dead?

Richard McKane living?

I like to draw energy from football

off the Television screen:

there is a spring in everyone’s footfall,

life like the pitch is green

not black as pitch.

Onto the bandwagon I hitch

my caravan of poetry,

I can see the wood from the trees

and ‘live like a tree, alone and free

and like a forest in fraternity.’

8 June 2002

Changing trousers is a dangerous business,

here I am at Terry’s cafe without keys,

daughter abed not answering the telephone.

These dull headaches: is it stress

rather than wine drunk to the lees

that leads me to the fellow-sufferer zone?

The excitement of the occasion

led me into shuddering in my speech.

Hikmet does this to my body at each

event – it is beyond reason.

I know the true traitors ands their treason

and Nazim Hikmet is not among them,

though people bend his words to suit,

like another poet I would have the guns shoot

out flowers and our mouths sing freedom songs

in mountains and in plains,

to right the wrongs

and equiliberate the strains.

8 June 2002

SONG (similar tune to the Kinks’ ‘It was the biggest house in the neighbourhood’.)

It was the broadest home in the universe,

then he got a job and it was cursed.

It almost drove him to the hearse,

but he found love and he found it first.

This poem, this song has to be terse.

A pint and a half of Guinness quenches my thirst.

My heart is so full it just might burst

and then who would write my own lines of verse.

FOOTBALL 2

Perhaps it is fated that I will revise through your eyes only,

that working with you alone will move the poems forward,

that your reading them will make the lines less lonely,

that our team will head goals like a centre forward.

Teamwork in translation is fundamental,

slipped passes can be picked up and tackled,

sentences can collide and be out of order,

mistakes lead to penalties: the test of the keeper

of the language dictionaries.

Words are more than functionaries

not just in books at Borders

or Waterstones that bans the smaller presses.

Time is running out – what’s the score?

Win, lose or draw,

the poem impresses,

but the crowds don’t roar.

8 June 2002

A whole month has passed since I last

wrote a poem to you. I have been lasting

out on the food longlasting

you gave me for thought, for fantasy.

If anything of me is everlasting

it is these poems clasping

your soul in embrace,

remembering your voice’s trace,

your laughter’s entrancing tracerwork,

its musical trill like notes on a trellis.

The prison bars become flimsy lattice:

‘The gardens are waiting for you to wait in them.’

8 June 2002

Last night I looked myself up on the Internet

and went through 5 or 6 search pages.

It went on for ages –

two o’clock came and I hadn’t gone to bed yet.

Now I’m having breakfast at the Giggly Sausage,

Richard, soi sage, mon vieux, soi sage.

If at last I can show some sagacity,

let me keep to the tenets of veracity.

10 June 2002

It’s later in the day in Cyprus,

Azerbaijan, earlier in America

and you three are more than pins on an Atlas.

Meetings will come again at last.

For one I wrote ‘Love of Flying’ – I echoed Erica,

one teaches and writes on Robert Graves,

about the third too my mind raves.

We are all separated by distance

and none of you know each other

and I’m more of the age of uncle than brother,

but as a poet I am in your sisterhood

and my female side is well developed.

Gretna Green and eloping

is for none of us an option,

better to co-opt the Muses, the whole nine of them

and let them dance, sing,

perform our poems.

10 June 2002

Twenty pounds left in the Bank –

life is still unstable.

It’s not my genes I have to thank,

but feasting at poetry’s table.

To right this I am incapable,

interpret it how I may,

should go into farming arable,

but keep the GM crops at bay.

If a line sows a seed

in your heart, I’ll succeed

in harvesting a thousandfold,

perhaps only when I am dead and old.

To be a shepherd you need sheep,

to make bread you need to reap.

10 June 2002

THESEUS’ THESIS

Just a few lines

to say I miss your mail.

Just a few rhymes,

take down the black sail.

The minotaur is slain,

roll up the ball of thread.

This myth is full of pain,

for Aegeus the father is dead,

cast himself down from the tower,

at what should have been his happiest hour.

It’s all in black and white:

jumble your myths but get your messages right.

11 June 2002

SLEEPING WITH POETRY

My Muse is not a succubus

or an incubus, sucks

not ‘my blood through a ventral wound’

as I posited decades ago in Istanbul,

but though she accompanies my Friends,

from them she is distinguishable.

She is not fantasy but spirit,

arouses these lines and we serve each other.

Though incorporeal She is my poetry’s principle.

Not girlfriend, wife, sister or mother,

not Aphrodite  with the hundred nipples,

nor the whore of Babylon,

nor Alexander Blok’s Stranger,

nor a 50s vamp with nylons,

nor the Mother Superior in the Bethany nunnery,

nor the beauty on the beach’s tannery,

but she keeps her favoured poets from the danger

of not writing by making it exciting:

sweet inspiration wafts from her soul,

interdependent this poet makes her whole.

12 June 2002

FOR LOVE OF RUSSIAN POETRY

FOR SUTTON RUSSIAN CIRCLE

I call on the spirit of Pushkin,

the poets who have become my kith and kin,

who send a shudder down my skin

of pleasure, terror and recognition.

Translating them challenges my cognition,

rereading never leads to repetition,

for me their poems have become a petition

for the rights of poetry for human beings.

More a lucid vision than just seeing,

less thinking than feeling,

their reality leaves me reeling:

it is a terrible beauty they sing

of love and suffering,

this is what we give you this evening.

13 June 2002

THE STRUGGLE

On three occasions that I’ve read Nazim Hikmet

I have trembled or rather shuddered.

At the last, I said: ‘I’m trembling from excitement’

and with a burst of applause this was met.

Perhaps I should take a beta-blocker

to steady my stage-fraught nerves,

it’s not as though I am in the Enguland locker

room, still I do the performance with verve.

All this isn’t good for the blood pressure,

I sweat and have long hot flushes,

yet it’s healthy: it goes a long way a little stress

and I wouldn’t settle for less.

I’ve been through the muddle of angina pectoris.

They suffered from the struggle: Achilles and Hector risked.

13 June 2002

We had not talked ourselves dry,

had grocked each other in the eye,

had not obliterated ourselves with Is,

had read my translations not just of sadness and sighs.

If those poets talked through me

and their spirits had the power to see,

if we remained singularly free,

should we therefore keep anonymity?

In a book in ten years time,

will we recognise ourselves

and take down that book from the shelf

hold it in our palms and say ‘That was a good time.’

Or will I e-mail this now to the real you,

because you understood the black and white sail and I feel you

prick the remaining bubble of my arrogance,

delicately, humorously – and yet these words dance

in this pub in the twelfth hour.

So accept this as my thanks. It’s not flowers

or a bottle of mature red wine:

it’s just a few meditated lines

written against a music too loud

by a man who is exceedingly proud

to know you. The night is almost over.

I will remember your reading ‘Mountain Lullaby’ by Sedakova,

Negar’s ‘Forgive me’ and Katia Kapovich.

There the atmosphere of poetry was rich.

Here the drum kit almost drowns my poetry kit,

the twin screens mutely play their films

but this poem is baking in my kiln –

soon it’ll be fired and my eyes will be glazed in sleep.

No insomnia for you either, I hope:

here are my words for you to keep,

now fall lovingly down slumber’s slope.

13 June 2002

Tiredness and the music is getting to my head.

Not fucked up, I’d like to be tucked up in bed.

I am enjoying freedom of movement and thought.

Article 19, it cannot be bought

but has to be protected

even when people don’t exercise it.

Some pretty high barriers I must have erected

but now this poetry – I cannot excise it,

it comes without let-up in rhyming couplets,

toned, flexible, muscular, supple.

13 June 2002

FOR OSIP MANDELSTAM

Translating prose saps the poems –

a different tension is at play.

It’s of a different sort of clay,

more earthy not the blue-black loam

of Voronezh and Mandelstam Osip.

The almond trunk has become a stump

but he’s still a subject for literary gossip.

*

He was always on edge

in Voronezh

but there were fewer black ravens,

those police cars:

it became the last haven

for his poetry’s powers.

The black earth

inspired, gave birth.

19 June 2002

The glow has gone though it’s summer again

and the cessation of the constant summer rain

means if one whole sun has set

it’ll undoubtedly be back in 8 hours

and isn’t your book called Two Suns.

Surely our friendship continues

though we are out of conventional touch

I wait for your mail with its clues...

I still love you very much.

After June 19, 2002

A CUP OF TEA WTIH MYSELF

Lonely round breakfast,

and aloneness teaches fast

and is not independence

for I am dependent

on these words, this notebook

and by hook or by crook

I will gather a book

of these poems for vous not toi

and spouses will not hit the roof

for this is a friendly ploy,

written on the hoof,

my sacred emploi.

22 June 2002

Out of the blue, from over the horizon,

in the middle of the day, with the heat rising,

came your letter that made me feel better.

I could have got upsetter

if I hadn’t known you’d write.

Now I feel easier and light:

again the words take two way flight.

24 June 2002

The great heat and my lack of sleep

has had the effect of labyrinthitis,

when, if anything, legs having landed in a heap

I should be due for arthritis.

If one emerges after slaying the Minotaur from the labyrinth,

after death does one deserve a statue on a plinth?

You caught me sleeping again between sentences

and dream/sleep is all the tenses,

though I am not like you an interpreter of dreams,

it’s possible for Russians you and I are the A Team.

24 June 2002

A fall in the tube detached exercise book from covers:

how weak the glue must be.

I’m writing to a friend not a lover

and it doesn’t behove that he or she

should be seen in the light of any other.

But they’ll say the friendship is a relationship

and I’m sure you’re making love to her,

but from me you can take a tip...

24 June 2002

FOR MUSA FARHI WHO SAID ‘I AM BECOMING YOUR MUSE’

Waiting for Musa – we each carry our baggage,

not just walk-on hand luggage

but the weight of our brain, heart and conscience.

One day your turn and one day mine to take the conch

from each other: which of us will die first, my friend, my brother?

Five or ten minutes late – to me it’s no bother:

these lifelines I’ll write to smother my mother’s

comments that outside the top flight, writing poetry is pathetic:

she and I: it’s developing into the literary polemic

of my life, but I’m no nearer publishing a book

of mine and bringing home with poems the bacon,

though translations they took and translations they’ve taken.

Look, I say again translations are my poems, to this too, Ma, awaken.

25 June 2002

12 minutes till the next tube, but it’s the wrong line.

An impromptu poem not interfered with by wine.

I’ll have to change onto the Bank line,

whom for this screw up do I have to thank?

But poetry helps me out of tight corners.

I remember the sisters Warner,

(nothing to do with the film brothers),

one wrote on the Virgin Mary, the other

is an art critic with a penchant for fair play –

they’re both as complicated as Paul Klee.

?25 June 2002

DIARY ENTRY

Thinking of you helps when I know what you’re doing,

your head not bent over the computer,

I know, reading and sending e-mails.

I am confining myself to London this summer

to the work I love – no trip to Turkey.

I didn’t open attached files from Cyprus and Italy,

the latter marked ‘urgente’ –

fortunate, for that was indeed a virus.

Recently I have had enquiries various

about writers in prison in Turkey from PEN in Canada

and for advice on the role of the interpreter

for a human rights’ play at The Gate.

Go through the field and shut the gate

after you and know with Pasternak that life is not crossing a field,

especially as it’s probably mined,

and what about the mind field, with its

dopamine receptors out of kilter?

I’m drinking decaffe black coffee from a filter,

eating no solids, for tomorrow I’ll be endoscoped,

and colonoscoped. No findings I hope,

this last year my love for life has telescoped

and I magnify in my Magnificats

your beauty and yours and yours.

27 June 2002

The endoscopy’s scope:

two biopsies from the duodenum,

now I have to suffer the interregnum

of four weeks before the Dr’s verdict,

obita dicta,

or write my own obit!

Take a hold that’s stricter

and only tell poems about it

or those few friends that can these things can handle.

Since I decided like Graves

poetry would be my religion

I conjure up Pasternak’s candle

on the table burning.

I am not a first Christian centurion in the legion,

54 and I’m still learning,

tomorrow we’ll put my nanny in the grave.

30 June 2002

The missing element of the equation,

the one that’s always approached with evasion,

is, my friends, love – in passion and friendship.

As the proud prow, sharp end of the ship,

ploughs forward through the unrest field

and the waters can only part and yield,

the poems come up like dolphins from the deep.

Yes, Robert Frost, I too have promises to keep.

Please don’t monopolise the rhyme ‘sleep’,

see, there are also crossroads in the sea

and traffic, like on land it’s not entirely free.

The air, now that’s another kettle of fish;

watch out here it is again that rhyme desire,

in one’s dreams alone we are flyers

on wings over the horizon:

remember me, my loves, in your prayers, in your orisons

or Shakespeare will shake his spear in the heavens,

not that he’s an authoritarian author

but not a single line of his would I alter.

The water on my flight to Moscow was fake Evian,

at the end the trip turned into a disaster,

but 45 minutes after ten years gap of yoga

saved me – slava bogu, slava bogu.

2 July 2002

WAITING IN THE CAFE FOR JAMES THACKARA

You’re tall so I’ll see you over the heads of the queue,

like an actor I eagerly await the cue

to start our conversation.

You’re right on time, right on cue,

the converse of a BR train at its destination.

Did Stoppard in his trilogy rip off your Book Of Kings,

or is that book already part of the universal consciousness?

You are not being a drama king,

but you believe sincerely that it should be on his conscience.

Who am I to raise D.M. Thomas’ plagiarism

of John Fennel’s Penguin Pushkin

and to pop it in parallel into our conversation?

Writers often use ideas akin

to each other: you muse whether it’s a compliment.

There seems to have been no infringement

of copyright, so you can’t implement

legal proceedings. I’ve never seen you so upset –

you even held the conch when I had been set

on getting your sympathy for the possible result of my two biopsies.

Instead, the first part of the trilogy got its post mortem autopsy.

So, as I saw you with your mind topsy-turvy,

I, the Limy, gave you limes against literary scurvy –

for you were further out at sea

than I’d ever seen you, more angry

with no shore in sight. I launched the lifeboat

of friendly advice: for those words you wrote

first had created in me too a susurrus

and we had agreed there were  Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky ,

but it was a feeling, a hegemony of ideas

that you revealed – and it fell to neither of your from the sky.

Perhaps these rhymes to you seem facile,

I hope you take this poem as fertile not futile:

a friend’s attempt to honour your emotion,

to equiliberate the literary equation.

Ultimately a borrowed idea is an unknown quantity,

it is your feelings I respect: The Book of Kings’ integrity.

Finally you said the single audience in that theatre

may have been as many as bought your book,

yet it’s one of the only novels I have read for years and long after

I wrote this poem in two long sittings. Look:

feelings are more honest than facts

and since you felt hit in the stomach

this friend had to act.

We’ve defended enough other’s human rights

to almost forget to fight our own fights.

Today you made me forget my biopsies:

I’d imagined I was up for the autopsy.

Thank you, James, for that you made me listen

and that this kitchen table I christened

with almost the first poem

written in the shelter of my home.

As Helen Bamber said to me that afternoon

at the MF: ‘We have to keep our heads above the parapet.’

And who am I to question her or that?

4-5 July 2002

Chain smoking Camels –

research on mammals

has proved that they contain carcinogens

and my brain is deprived of oxygen.

The old habit doesn’t die

but I certainly could die

with my blood pressure high.

Though I wouldn’t kill a fly

I encourage any cancer cells to multiply.

10 July 2002

WISH YOU WERE HERE!

You say you’re in a veritable pit

and you can’t write when you are in it.

You have been at the dacha

for six weeks and I should be going to Datca

for the Can Yucel Festival,

but for us life is not a carnival.

The weather has been good here for a week,

the sunlight makes me the reverse of weak,

and Re: verse writing: I am mainly translating prose,

to attend to that I bring this poem to a close.

19 July 2002

Sitting in an Albanian Cafe,

drinking a Cappuccino Nescafe.

The traffic fumes on its way:

I can say I’ve had a very good day.

But you say: ‘When I’m in a pit

I am in a pit.’ The flame you lit

in me still burns, has not gone out:

though the tiny electric pulse of your e-mail

did not make my pulse race as before.

20 July 2002

When the black dog bites in the middle of the night

and even the World Service does not help,

keep on the bedside light,

calm the dog so it doesn’t yelp,

stroke the black hairs of its coat,

read a book with lines they wrote,

those authors who share your point of view,

who suffered for their readers and you

in particular, and articulated

just what your sleep belated

needed...

A mistake has been made

but it can still be rectified.

Let it then be fructifying,

health-giving like green jade.

‘Words are like seeds of a pomegranate,’

I once said, ‘and the poem is granite.’

Poems are my past, poems are my future,

descriptions of faces and features

of friends I love and care for.

28 July 2002

*     *     *

Sitting in the garden at the Albanian Cafe,

writing kafiyeler is my keyif,

no one can take it away:

it is my craft and play.

You say my rhymes verge on the bathetic,

that I cannot manage the simple arithmetic

of syllables, rhythm and metre,

but mater, you are not my alma mater

no more than Marlborough or Oxford really are,

my poetry split from them long ago

and in solitude I have to boost my own ego

and I reach deep into foreign languages,

their joys and anguishes.

Yet still critics perpetrate the linguistic rubbish

that translators are close to traitors:

my blood boils: we are such faithful

friends, informed not informers.

There is warmth in our hands,

we breathe in the air of our writers

and strive to make the writing tighter.

28 July 2002

No mobile phone, no number even,

no fare for a minicab or taxiing,

I’m going to be well late

for Mimi Khalvati at the Arcola.

Sweating in this summer evening

and golf played in the morning.

Roasted, I could offer myself up on a plate,

washed down with cool, colonial cola.

I’ve waited to meet you outside

poetry venues for so long,

now I’m stuck offside

at the station with this poem/song.

Mimi, forgive me, I’ll be ten minutes late,

a goods train passes with a load of slate.

29 July 2002

THE READING CAP

I must put on my reading cap

and read the blank verse of today.

I have a lot of catching up to do,

even my Russian poetry reading

has suffered these days

as I translate Asiye’s prose

and concentrate on Oktay Rifat.

Prose is a different process.

The words process in a different way

across the screen furling over at the end of the line,

rather than ending with a resonant rhyme.

The pulse is different: stamina is the name of the game,

before it was to the sprint of the quatrain that I laid claim.

Why not then the two, with a dividing line

in between – my e-mails have never failed

and the little box seems to be a frame

for poetry – word-lover, logic-lover, wisdom-lover

that I am until I die and my lines will be over.

31 July 2002

FOR TONY ANHOLT

Tony Anholt’s life has come to a halt

at such an early age.

He did justice to human rights’ poems on the page

in our fundraising Words and Music for the Foundation,

with his performance in Howard’s Way he riveted a nation.

He was a founder member of Who Cares Wins,

his characters were always capable of crafty spin,

handsome to the last, urbane without it being over the top:

no one can delete that final, premature full stop

On the shores of the Caspian you fell from your horse at a gallop.

I am attempting to give up smoking.

It’s before lunch. I have a tea on the go.

I am a bit irritable.

No doubt in Azerbaijan there is the Shell scallop

and the dollar sign is not just a token.

I have to keep my breathing slow

and anchor my thoughts to this table.

Writing a complex poem is like a dose of nicotine –

do anything to get the natural rush of adrenaline

without the furore?? or the boost of caffeine –

spliffs of hashish, coke, heroine are not my scene,

nor do I have a problem with alcohol –

but people have accused me of indulging in workahol.

9 August 2002

From poems I have had a long break,

have not been treating my wound’s ache:

see my poetry feet crack and creak

like death-watch beetles in beams’ teak.

Motes float in my eyes

and very rarely

a jagged liquid line:

a sign of migraine?

I am on the century’s border duty,

a pacifist centurion,

at the crossing of the Rubicon,

to fight for poems’ beauty.

As in a diary I make this entry,

attention, stand at ease, sentry.

9 August 2002

ASIYE’S STORY

The translation of your book liberated me –

I wish it could liberate you.

it is almost as though they’re berating me

to say: ‘It must have been draining on you.’

True it’s a busman’s holiday from my interpreting work.

It is pro the real peoples of Turkey, not anti-Turk.

To all those victimised and tortured for writing:

I tell them to keep fighting –

that the true traitors are the perpetrators,

that the shame and guilt should be laid at their doors.

That when they smash down the doors

of homes, when they burst in on men and women’s honour

with violence and violation it is upon our

words and bodies too. No more lying low

and biding our time – Asiye wants her freedom now!

before 14 August 2002

This place, which is a hot spot even in winter,

which contains so many crosses’ splinters

of torture and brings so many perpetrators

to the book on a daily basis,

investigates so many individual cases,

but they are the tip of the blazing iceberg,

that drowned the innocent passengers on the Titanic,

and we treat attacks of depression and panic

caused by torture that is endemic and systematic,

far from the reactions, knee-jerk and automatic...

14 August 2002
FOR ONE AND MANY

I’m sharing a little of your Cypriot heat

which you say makes you so dead-beat,

looking ahead not to the autumn of the grave

but reading our elected poet Robert Graves

and buying his Collected Poems.

Surely there are inlets with cool caves

on the coast near enough to your home?

Don’t burn out – brave it out, this huge summer

with its lettuce, tomatoes and cool cucumber

and the melons and water melons I remember

so fondly – cut them for me and eat them with conversation

with whomsoever – I am not jealous

for we have our silent thoughts’ communication

and this cannot be called silence by us.

14 August 2002

This rare hot London day,

polluted by combustion-borne commuters,

still gives a summer quality to the cafe –

of heat that cannot be disputed.

My thoughts revolve round

three or four books to be completed.

My spirits are not depleted,

the energy I’d never lost now is truly found.

And I never in 30 years lost my Turkish language –

it was never excess baggage:

after we’ve passed through life’s frontier at any age,

the words remain in friends’ memories and perhaps on the page

when the visuals are gone, faces

are faded photos, bones or ashes are archaeological traces.

14 August 2002

MINE IS THE FIELD

The poet, the beggar and this hot weather,

whether I or he will die first,

these burdens with which we’re cursed,

our souls cry out to have their thirst quenched.

Explosion.

Experience.

Exploitation.

I slip him a goldie,

old but I don’t read The Oldie.

My soul is not yet sold,

privately or to any State.

What a private eye can detect,

becomes not private – invective

means going public, can wreck

lives with its hectoring,

and I never found a cushy job lecturing.

This city is my university,

my ward, my flock, my constituency,

but no longer do I leave our doors unlocked

like in the country – more’s the pity.

Stop the clock:

I want to get out of its inexorable hands,

to travel back an age to mysterious lands,

to Greece and Turkey and further back to Afghanistan

and countries that are close to me yet in memory’s distance.

I adopt an internationalist’s stance.

17 August 2002

FOR HELEN

Did you realise as I left

after our talk, say six weeks ago,

you said: ‘Well we must just

keep our heads above the parapet’?

A couple of days ago I had a dream:

we met in the corridor at MF

and I followed you to the room next to yours

and said: ‘I’ve been waiting to say this for six weeks’

and you said the famous words: ‘Not now Richard.’

Here we are six weeks past at least:

no not six weeks, twice six years and two more

since we met at the Temperance Hospital

and it is always a lot more

easy to interpret your given words

than rally them into a poem, a speech,

yet still you are in these words reach,

though less words now will be said each to each,

but perhaps no ultimate silence of death will follow

for either of us: the Chinese whispers of interpreting

in my case of English, Turks, Russian speakers, and Kurds

will haunt those after in changed lives.

The castle parapet is a lonely place,

pacifist sentry duty at the frontiers of the centuries.

They say you’re leaving – I don’t believe it

till I see you say it again face to face:

and may your tenancy at Langland Gardens

be for many years and your heart never harden.

‘I beg you pardon’ as the popular songs goes,

but when I joined ‘you never promised me a rose garden.’

You never made us into puppets

or dummies on the walls – we join you, our heads held high,

above your castle’s parapet,

as we still daily view the broken lives and slaughter

that happened in the recent past and didn’t oughta.

Now you may have more time to review

life, the lives you have strived to renew.

So what’s new? That torture continues

apace, traces its scar lines on the world’s face.

Camelot was always in ruins, but your, our MF is still a place

where hope can shine through the dark,

even when it is dungeon-deep and stark.

Since we bleed too, it’s difficult

to imagine above Scottish heather a skylark

singing in the sky: by this transparent metaphor

I mean to maintain faith in love, for whom? For?

Yes, for those who came after and before,

as well as those present

in the often tense present.

Now at this edge of time between present and future

when the past is the predominant feature

I return you to that skylark above the heather:

hark, can you hear him, can you hear her?

Richard McKane

23^rd August 2002

Set these words to music –

they’re on a vox pop topic:

don’t let any voice abuse it

but a folk one drunk on hop-picking.

I was systematised, stigmatised, my tongue ripped out,

all I could do was ward off the clouts.

My lips on medication they did pout,

I was lucky to give poetry a flout.

The times in hospital wards really hurt.

For years I couldn’t give the Muse a flirt,

but the ink still, it flowed in spurts,

then I started coming back to earth.

Of rhymes I never had a dearth

after I had my Second Birth,

everywhere became my own turf:

the sea, the shore, the interlapping surf.

SUICIDE ON THE TRACKS

I had been sleeping on the Kentish Town bench,

and slept through my Charing Cross train.

The grey-haired woman couldn’t stand the strain

and leapt in front into the rails’ trench.

I heard screams and shouts -

all she wanted was out.

The pace of the train was so slow,

that she might have been alive down below.

Now I think I should have talked to her or the driver,

rather than shocked going up the escalator.

I am after all for this far better equipped than most,

and now I’ll never know whether she gave up the ghost

and this memory could have haunted me.

This suicide could have taunted me,

but I am no longer near the edge.

Postscript:

‘Regretfully, sir, the passenger died –

it does happen.’ The guard told me at London Bridge.

30 September 2002

I slipped up, forgot my interpreting slips

before going off to get my root canal fixed.

Better to be holidaying by the canals of Venice

than to be prone as the amalgam is mixed.

But look, for myself I have ten minutes.

I am all twitchy today, time to calm down,

the sun is out, no need to wear a frown,

got to complete 150 words on the Uzbeks.

I said my life was topsy turvy

as by chance I met Derek on his bicycle at the corner.

We set a time for breakfast at Terry’s,

that suicide on the tracks, I have to mourn her.

See, I’ve clutched time for a sonnet,

the train pulls in, I’ve done it.

2 September 2002

Heart broken, words spoken – was love a token?

Fruit not eaten, wife not beaten, not Adam in Eden,

not with Eve at the eve of creation,

not to spawn the murderer and his victim in procreation.

After Starbucks closed we went down a side street

to a Pub near the British Library. Who should we meet

but like old friends two English strangers.

I quoted: ‘In saying hello there lies danger’,

as my Russian poet said from the Leningrad Arsenal.

They weren’t interested in talking about Arsenal.

The father went straight to the heart of conversation,

the pros and cons of versification

and his son being a ‘closet guitarist’.

Reza brought not so much the East of the sitarist

as his poet’s ear for language

and I noticed the rhythms of speech

and soon we were all paying homage

to our ‘chance’ meeting and our reaching

each other in this strange desert of London

where the people thirst for such conversation

and the culture tapestries of the world are picked undone.

8 September 2002

AT ISFAHAN RESTAURANT

The synthesiser plays, the men dance athletically

arms in the crucifix position, fingers clicking.

The synthetic chemicals of a Fanta

dispel the jagged pool of light in front of

my eyes, or is it the effect of the Clan pipe tobacco.

At this table perhaps I’m back oh

back in the Xanadu literary bar in Tehran

for at this table are Ziba and Reza Baraheni

and the talk is English, Farsi, Turkish and Azeri

and Negar is missing, but she’s left Azerbaijan

for Spain and where is Kurdish Bejan?

And where is Mimi Khalvati

for this meal, the end of the day kahvalti,

and little Reza and brother Muhammed

both like big Reza hammered

by regimes and my soul poets’ souls,

brain cells battered in prison cells.

Let their brains’ electricity be calmed

here in this my country: this is a shepherd’s psalm

far from the King David Hotel.

Let them recharge their batteries

and ignore winning the capitalist lottery.

8 September 2002

ON FINISHING THE TURKEY POEMS

I’m not necessarily looking for bilingual readers,

for people who are two people with double souls.

I am not attempting to bring coals to Zonguldak

or Newcastle or to be able to topple political leaders,

yet my aim is to more than entertain,

not just to serve an English breakfast or offer cigarette boreks,

but to let the English and Turkish lines take up the strain,

as a human rights’ interpreter with words to take the pain from wrecked lives,

to be the beekeeper in a village tending hives

that will produce the same red honey as Nazim Hikmet’s,

to fight against dictator’s dictats,

and if the Muse of poetry dictates to me a few lines

I will embroider them and read them as signs

and offer them up to you this very eveningtime

when the sun has gone down in Turkey

and is dipping below the buildings in London town.

12 September 2002

The live music in the Lebanese Restaurant

has driven me out to sit on the street.

I leave my colleague interpreters to have an earful

and I who have not had a skinful

make words meet words and have a creative rest.

It’s Edgware Road. I’ve only had mezes

and these days I’m wondering about a book of essays

to extend my lines in writing.

The world could soon be fighting

again: cannot they fight

in word not deed? My heart bleeds

for this new century’s casualties.

We are really sewing the seeds

of our own destruction – 20 years

later they grow up to military age.

I wish we could have a literary battle

with words on the page settling

the issues.

12 September 2002

Perched on an Arab Restaurant stool outside opposite Woolworths,

daughter soon to start  the job in Walworth,

feeling the tweak of what might be a new friendship –

currently no special one am I worshipping.

You said you had a tendency to tipsiness,

well, your highness, talk down my lowness,

as they turn up the volume of the music high

and I repair outside with an old man’s sigh.

12-15 September 2002

RE-VERSAL

My poems have had a reversal.

The old adversary time is squeezing them out.

Before they flowed easy as a stream,

not mainstream but with a head of steam,

bass as the Volga boatmen’s song,

strong-sinewed, but now the ship is hawsered.

Bored, no I’m not but several friendships are on hold,

but in their holds is precious poetry cargo.

It wasn’t what was in the Argo but the Argonauts

that were important as they moored in the ports,

not the plane but the pilot that flies it,

not the plane tree but the cat and Hikmet

beside it. But I know the material lasts longer

than the human, even though it’s scrapped and cut down.

Feelings are stronger than thoughts,

straining at galley oars,

meditation by water and tree with its either ors,

the pit of the stomach in the jet’s dive,

this feeling that in creating one is truly alive:

the brush, the pen, the pallette knife,

the pencil, the chisel, the staff on the rock, the jet of water of life,

create the miracle.

19 September 2002

VICE VERSA

My friend James, the novelist,

tells me to keep writing poems and living

for him, and I say ‘And vice prosa’:

even our coffee cups laughed.

19 September 2002

Young black eyes she’s gone back to silence.

My knight’s lance is blunt,

together we slew torture’s dragon

and it wasn’t a stunt.

Now you are a dream –

I hope you too have no nightmares

and your subconscious streams well,

no day or night terrors

and tears of joy alone well.

19 September 2002

The poems burst like a cloud

into the dry, plain day.

The words I hadn’t allowed

fell lightly then heavily like rain.

How refreshing to a poet’s soul,

even though you have to hoist the umbrella

and it’s by the tarmac and potholes

that the cloudburst catches this city dweller.

19 September 2002

Waves of tiredness though sun has not set –

I rest in the troughs between words.

Turkish yoghurt has replaced curds and whey,

and you no longer hear the word junket.

We are under the regime of David Blunkett,

when asylum seekers feel threatened blindly;

every day I take an oral exam and don’t flunk it:

my interpreted words I deliver kindly.

There is still a difference for me between home and office,

in the latter there’s translation work in the triangle,

in the other books, poems and e-mails suffice.

20 September 2002

I carry you in my head and heart

now you are no longer in front of my eyes.

It has been difficult this part

of our time – this three months of parting.

I try in my mind to surmise a sunrise,

the future in the present.

You were heaven-sent,

essential to my life work and times,

generously furnishing me with rhymes,

harmonious, appropriate in their context.

So, here you are, back in my texts,

welcome for our next time.

?20/21 September 2002

ON REREADING ASIYE’S STORY

There is a solidarity between reader and author

but how much greater between translator and her,

but then as I discovered the right English words

for pain, for hurts, torture and suffering,

for rebirth, coping in the present and returning the future

I realised we were sharing a language of thought and feeling

between our two languages and the overwhelming feeling

on reading was not only in words, but visual, in the imagination,

as you stretched out to me from the smuggled out pages

from the prisons fighting against unjust incarceration

and torture’s treason.

21-24 September 2002

CAFEMATIC POEMS

My automatic reaction on sitting in a cafe

is to put poems into action.

Boosted by coffee caffeinated or decaf

the poems are almost automatic writing off the cuff,

realistic or romantic or populist:

it is as though the Muse is a song-bird perched on my wrist

and instead of lips being kissed

this poet realises that his power is in his pen,

the plume of the swan

when the swan song is sung.

24 September 2002

IF I

If I’m awake I don’t sleep.

If I sing I don’t weep

for I could not sing the words

and I don’t know the languages of Kurds.

If I can only say if I, if I,

that will still dry the tears from my eye,

give me hope to testify,

to not deny, to not take an eye for an eye.

Your eye led my voice,

like a movie camera.

If I is the choice

then I record many ephemera.

(In John Fox’s Workshop at MF) 24 September 2002

A SMILE ON TUBE STRIKE DAY

Beautiful woman on train.

I peek – her book is French.

All we say is au revoir

and we smile at each other,

both knowing it’s adieu.

25 September 2002

Sitting on the stone plinth by the railway bridge

I draw back from the edge of my life,

don’t fall off the flat world at the Pillars of Hercules,

still tease you with my mythologies.

Those long journeys into the night of the soul,

whole tragedies yet with elements of comedy.

The interpreter’s scope accommodates all stories,

scary, hopeless and helpless autobiographies,

telescoped into a couple of hours –

the words are not mine but ours.

25 September 2002

I found the olives you sent

and they were greyer, drier.

This poet lives again when you and I write

and now on the tube I tire

and wish to close my eyes tight

as I return home to my desk

where beside your jiffy bag lie

the pebbles, shell and olive twigs,

for this peaceful poem, they, you ask –

in just a jiffy, I will have performed my task.

29 September 2002

Push a bit harder against the resistance.

Insist that the oxygen rush to the brain,

train it like muscles on the physique.

No strain, no gain must be my critique.

The backbone needs this daily stress,

the poem the tension on the line.

Akhmatova knew this as her handwriting inclined.

Peter Levi’s lemon juice of lines.

30 September 2002

When the pouring of Guinness takes so long

and the ride on the escalator seems to go on and on,

when the wait at the traffic lights is an eternity:

you realise time conflicts with modernity.

Boredom like time-wasting is the modern person’s enemy,

yet verily, verily I say unto you: ‘all things come to she or he who waits’:

the English queuing system at entrance gates,

bus stops, theatres and cinemas

is meant to minimise aggression.

I have the impression that at the Gates of Heaven

there might not be such an even-tempered crowd.

30 September 2002

The mood is a little unsteady

as though I am not ready

for something connected with writing.

In Iraq will there be fighting,

the Gulf War troops be back?

Pen and printer ink I do not lack –

I’ll write my way out of this cul-de-sac.

30 September 2002

Pale, weak sun as I eat my breakfast outside

on the street at Tel’s Cafe.

The iron table gleams.

Sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms and beans

will carry me through to the afternoon.

The poet I feared most (at Oxford),

the first I came across, Dave Raine, had a first line:

‘I have looked at fried eggs and boiled eggs too’

and my brother Andrew’s favourite poem of mine

began: ‘It was a day of breakfast, lunch and supper.’

These meals at least give me ruminative time.

The breakfast may be heavy and in this sunlight

the poems may be deceptive, not entirely weak and light.

?1 October 2002

FOR ZIBA AND STEPHEN

As the reading ended and I mingled with the crowd,

precious little pence jingling in my pocket

I felt so euphoric I tried to say it in Persian out loud,

in contrast to the teaching of David Blunkett.

Sina, the seven year old nephew of Reza

had published a poem in his school magazine,

in the Pub or rather outside our consumption was not that of Gazza

though an orgasmic goal was scored on the screen.

Feeling happy too not just but primarily from Stephen and Ziba’s reading

but because my Turkish translator Coskun is already heeding

in to my own poems and my e-mails are safe from virus,

touch wood, preserved in hard copy like papirus.

Oh, what fun I am having writing this on the tube,

this is even better than self-torment with Rubic’s cube

and once I interpreted for a psychotherapist and Russian who said he

                                                                                  was it’s inventor.

It’s not real coffee again but friends and deserved luck that is my good

                                                                         mood’s incentive.

3 October 2002

Hammersmith-Embankment

Trains of thought go off the rails,

polluted water comes up in pails,

the well that should be well just wells tears

and night terrors turn into day’s errors fears.

Oh, the lot of the asylum seeker,

mind and body weakened by torture,

flashbacks to blows to the head and back,

the constant fear of being sent back.

This poet writes well-fed at breakfast,

questioning himself without interrogator.

The torturers’ wish is to break them fast:

my poems – I will never forget them.

The day breaks with the weak autumn sun:

words I have caught them – this sonnet is done.

4 October 2002

Today I must do nothing to make me more paranoid,

a hard working day will make me less annoyed,

at supper, glass in hand, I’d be like Keith Floyd,

debonair – hiding the void in my stomach.

For it’s like being kicked by a horse in the thigh:

the marrow of my transplanted e-mails gallops, flies

round in space and there is nothing I am able

to do until they disinfect the computer’s stable.

4 October 2002

In the good old days of tortoise mail –

and that still beat the hare of e-mail –

in the days of perlustration

when nation was against nation

and wars were cold not hot,

I would not need to give an explanation

for catching this virulent virus.

Now hundreds of people in my address book

enquire: ‘What us?’

Don’t scurry your mouse to the attached file,

delete it quick, be safe – for a while.

‘Do you have anything personal in there?’ My friend said,

and I said ‘Yes, lots – my poems, my letters, my heart, my head.’

4 October 2002

The morning of liberation of my computer dawned.

Bugbear is an aberration, a slug on a lawn,

eating at my poem’s leaves of grass.

Come James with your little saving disk, come fast,

disinfect this disaffected person

who suffers the effects more than the inanimate computer.

7 October 2002

ON A BENCH AT A BUS STOP IN ISLINGTON

He could be here, my brother Andrew,

the same as any other fifty year old man,

walking the streets of Islington,

his head not bowed but erect,

his life not wrecked unconsciously.

I’ll buy another ticket for him

for the Red Lion Theatre

to see Maggie who knew him

starring in the play ‘Waiting for the Angels’.

I guess you’re with them now, brother,

and Maggie tells me the play

is about forgiving and not forgiving.

12^th October 2002

I am proud to have lived in Southwark for over twenty years in flats near the Old Kent New Kent Roundabout – is it really still the bottom of the Monopoly Board? I used to take delight in saying to the GLC 88 cab drivers as we approached Borough that ‘We are now entering the Borough of Shakespeare, Chaucer and McKane!’ Twenty out of the twenty five or so books (mainly translations of Russian and Turkish poetry, but with three books of my own poetry) I have published have come out when I have been living in Southwark.

My most recent books are Poet for Poet (an anthology of my poems and best loved translations) [Hearing Eye], Nikolay Gumilyov The Pillar of Fire, commentary by Michael Basker [Anvil Press] – husband Anna Akhmatova, with whom I started my translation career, and from the Turkish Nazim Hikmet Beyond the Walls [Anvil Press] (co-translator Ruth Christie).

The poems that follow are from a prolific sequence of 3 years: The Coffeehouse Poems or Cafematic Poems (I haven’t decided on the title yet). I like (most of) the energy of football (as the Czech poet Miroslav Holub did). I have written several songs walking on the street between Borough Tube and London Bridge Tube. For some reason the energy there is particularly fertile.

Richard McKane 8 October 2002
When the pouring of Guinness takes so long

and the ride on the escalator seems to go on and on,

when the wait at the traffic lights is an eternity:

you realise time conflicts with modernity.

Boredom like time-wasting is the modern person’s enemy,

yet verily, verily I say unto you: ‘all things come to she or he who waits’:

the English queuing system at entrance gates,

bus stops, theatres and cinemas

is meant to minimise aggression.

I have the impression that at the Gates of Heaven

there might not be such an even-tempered crowd.

30 September 2002

The mood is a little unsteady

as though I am not ready

for something connected with writing.

In Iraq will there be fighting,

the Gulf War troops be back?

Pen and printer ink I do not lack –

I’ll write my way out of this cul-de-sac.

30 September 2002

Pale, weak sun as I eat my breakfast outside

on the street at Tel’s Cafe.

The iron table gleams.

Sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms and beans

will carry me through to the afternoon.

The poet I feared most (at Oxford),

the first I came across, had a first line:

‘I have looked at fried eggs and boiled eggs too’

and my brother Andrew’s favourite poem of mine

began: ‘It was a day of breakfast, lunch and supper.’

These meals at least give me ruminative time.

The breakfast may be heavy and in this sunlight

the poems may be deceptive, not entirely weak and light.

?1 October 2002

FOR ZIBA AND STEPHEN

As the reading ended and I mingled with the crowd,

precious little pence jingling in my pocket

I felt so euphoric I tried to say it in Persian out loud,

in contrast to the teaching of David Blunkett.

Sina, the seven year old nephew of Reza

had published a poem in his school magazine,

in the Pub or rather outside our consumption was not that of Gazza

though an orgasmic goal was scored on the screen.

Feeling happy too not just but primarily from Stephen and Ziba’s reading

but because my Turkish translator Coskun is already heeding

in to my own poems and my e-mails are safe from virus,

touch wood, preserved in hard copy like papirus.

Oh, what fun I am having writing this on the tube,

this is even better than self-torment with Rubic’s cube

and once I interpreted for a psychotherapist and Russian who said he

                                                                                  was it’s inventor.

It’s not real coffee again but friends and deserved luck that is my good

                                                                         mood’s incentive.

3 October 2002

Hammersmith-Embankment

Trains of thought go off the rails,

polluted water comes up in pails,

the well that should be well just wells tears

and night terrors turn into day’s errors fears.

Oh, the lot of the asylum seeker,

mind and body weakened by torture,

flashbacks to blows to the head and back,

the constant fear of being sent back.

This poet writes well-fed at breakfast,

questioning himself without interrogator.

The torturers’ wish is to break them fast:

my poems – I will never forget them.

The day breaks with the weak autumn sun:

words I have caught them – this sonnet is done.

4 October 2002

Today I must do nothing to make me more paranoid,

a hard working day will make me less annoyed,

at supper, glass in hand, I’d be like Keith Floyd,

debonair – hiding the void in my stomach.

For it’s like being kicked by a horse in the thigh:

the marrow of my transplanted e-mails gallops, flies

round in space and there is nothing I am able

to do until they disinfect the computer’s stable.

4 October 2002

In the good old days of tortoise mail –

and that still beat the hare of e-mail –

in the days of perlustration

when nation was against nation

and wars were cold not hot,

I would not need to give an explanation

for catching this virulent virus.

Now hundreds of people in my address book

enquire: ‘What us?’

Don’t scurry your mouse to the attached file,

delete it quick, be safe – for a while.

‘Do you have anything personal in there?’ My friend said,

and I said ‘Yes, lots – my poems, my letters, my heart, my head.

4 October 2002

The morning of liberation of my computer dawned.

Bugbear is an aberration, a slug on a lawn,

eating at my poem’s leaves of grass.

Come James with your little saving disk, come fast,

disinfect this disaffected person

who suffers the effects more than the inanimate computer.

7 October 2002

AFTER READING AT LAUDERDALE HOUSE

It was a strong feeling that this was a finale.

I’m a gettin tired of taunts about Armageddon.

There I was side by side with a beautiful young woman

reading my translations of her that eventually

others would read when I was dead and gone.

Was this a fully-fledged swan song?

No, I was wrong, this old gander

who did not pander to the audience

is not going to be put into the past tense

though medium term memory loss is a sign of senescence.

Let’s leave age out of it, let the translations cleave

to your poems, without infidelity.

And I raise a little prayer to poetry’s deity

not to deify you into a goddess on a pedestal

but still to worship you at the shrine of poetry,

to aim for a symmetry in translation. Is that enough? Is that all?

18 October 2002

‘SWINGS’ FOR WILLIAM HOPKINS

‘Psychiatry rhymes with poetry’

This is not automatic writing –

I am in control.

My poems have been on a roll

and this is deeply exciting.

You said: ‘Keep your feet on the ground

while you are on the swing’,

and I said that is not sound

and I am strong at visualising.

You’d read only my introduction

to Negar’s ‘On Wings Over the Horizon’

but still your comments were interesting,

soon I hope with the poems you’ll be wrestling –

no that’s too masculine.

I know you’ll ask questions of the lines,

unaware that rhymes are masculine and feminine,

male translator and woman poet,

those lines that are dressed to the nines

or like a naked sculpture sculpted,

more Classical in the original.

This is not automatic dictation:

I am in control.

The translations are on a roll

and this is a reason for elation.

I told you of Aronzon’s swings

from a couple of seconds to years.

You didn’t know that I was concealing

my own experiences, hopes and fears.

I told you of ‘P’ for plateau,

‘M’ for manic & ‘D’ for depression.

The code used in Russian

on answering a famous Russian poet’s telephone.

‘Plateau’ is the desirable zone.

We talked of the dangers

of getting down the mountain,

of my not being a stranger

to diving deep in the sea: one of the fountains

of my poetry. Barely a ten minute conversation

on the pros and cons of swings and versification,

two disciplines, psychiatry and poetry meeting head on.

A dialogue had been established,

now these lines are lavished

to further the poetry of the discussion.

18 October 2002

POEM COMPOSED ON WALKING TO MF

An ancient priest at the altar,

altering the world with prayer and faith.

Wreaths of laurel crown my head,

leading words to poetry’s rites.

Rights and wrongs their strengths display,

playing with words that will endure.

19 October 2002

Leaving Tolli’s Cafe

he raises his hand in benison,

bearded laird of this place

who doesn’t raise deer for venison.

Good friend, 300 pages into his London novel,

now going through less trouble.

We can talk at this level cafe table,

enabling the conversation, no disability there.

Survivors and holy fools,

castaways in not-so-cool Britannia,

I got my ticket from Petersburg via Tatiana

for the Russian Women Poets at the Festival Hall.

24 October 2002

I only had to wait a minute for the tube train

going up to you and going down.

‘I’m hot’ you said, ‘because I’m speaking’

and opened the slide window.

I told you of Alicia’s plough.

The translations did not need tweaking

so we spent the time being hot not bothered,

I, mentioning my mother’s love of my translations

but not of my own poetry, steering clear of psychiatry.

The photos of you demonstrated clear artistry,

one is interleaved in this notebook,

look, we quoted our poems to each other

and read new ones from our books.

Our eyes were rewarded with their looks

and it was only in speech you called me ‘vy’, I you ‘ty’.

25 October 2002

WORDS IN PURCELL

Looking deep into the distance in the Purcell Room bar,

coated bodies of well-known poets well in my vision.

I’m waiting for two people. I don’t know where they are.

I feel the Rein translation to be read needs a bit of revision.

The programme is from Lorca in New York. A

tease for any poet. It certainly doesn’t

help that I don’t know his work. They’ve not come, it irks

me and I’m not prepared for poetry small talk.

I could take a walk and miss it,

just dismiss it, go home and rest up –

with sleep I’d only wrestle

during the performance but I would be enhanced

by your presence, for Rein’s reign is not over.

*

Waitings are always different:

with some you are totally indifferent

to the surrounding people:

such as in the church under the equalising steeple.

But waiting for a poetry reading

in the populous bar/cafe:

the only escape is to be spreading

the populist words across the page.

26 October 2002

TEN MINUTE POEM

It is a race against the clock that’s ticking –

my line endings often take the Mick

out of what comes before. Picking

rhyme for each poems. I’d not allow myself to be Dick.

I’ll have to interpret in two ticks.

My left eyelid for long has not suffered from a tic,

put it down to the healing hands of Mick –

now it’s over, I have to walk over and make it quick.

28 October 2002

AT THE ENT HOSPITAL

A little bit of aggro in the hospital waiting room.

The long wait makes my thoughts zoom

and my stomach feel shaky.

Another interpreter has been booked for my client,

over this I don’t feel compliant

and I adopt a singular approach –

no way is he going to poach

him, with his orthopaedic boot and his loud voice.

30 October 2002

Why do I have to write this poem?

Is it an obsessive compulsion?

I’ve left my crippled computer at home

nearing extinction.

Last month I interpreted 120 contact hours

yet my powers did not diminish.

I’ve a lot left to finish.

1 November 2002

My jacket and shirt sodden –

I’m wearing autumn upon me.

The good weather has now gone shoddy –

time for a sunfilled holiday.

So I turn to the poems of Oktay

and become a botanist for Voltskaya

and for Asiye a town and country crier:

it’s inside me that I build the fire

and this burning will inspire

me to join the magical choir

of Akhmatova’s orphans

for of her I am a big fan.

1 November 2002

FOR HELEN

Did you realise as I left

after our talk, say six weeks ago,

you said: ‘Well we must just

keep our heads above the parapet’?

A couple of days ago I had a dream:

we met in the corridor at MF

and I followed you to the room next to yours

and said: ‘I’ve been waiting to say this for six weeks’

and you said the famous words: ‘Not now Richard.’

Here we are six weeks past at least:

no not six weeks, twice six years and two more

since we met at the Temperance Hospital

and it is always a lot more

easy to interpret your given words

than rally them into a poem, a speech,

yet still you are in these words reach,

though less words now will be said each to each,

but perhaps no ultimate silence of death will follow

for either of us: the Chinese whispers of interpreting

in my case of English, Turks, Russian speakers, and Kurds

will haunt those after in changed lives.

The castle parapet is a lonely place,

pacifist sentry duty at the frontiers of the centuries.

They say you’re leaving – I don’t believe it

till I see you say it again face to face:

and may your tenancy at Langland Gardens

be for many years and your heart never harden.

‘I beg you pardon’ as the popular songs goes,

but when I joined ‘you never promised me a rose garden.’

You never made us into puppets

or dummies on the walls – we join you, our heads held high,

above your castle’s parapet,

as we still daily view the broken lives and slaughter

that happened in the recent past and didn’t oughta.

Now you may have more time to review

life, the lives you have strived to renew.

So what’s new? That torture continues

apace, traces its scar lines on the world’s face.

Camelot was always in ruins, but your, our MF is still a place

where hope can shine through the dark,

even when it is dungeon-deep and stark.

Since we bleed too, it’s difficult

to imagine above Scottish heather a skylark

singing in the sky: by this transparent metaphor

I mean to maintain faith in love, for whom? For?

Yes, for those who came after and before,

as well as those present

in the often tense present.

Now at this edge of time between present and future

when the past is the predominant feature

I return you to that skylark above the heather:

hark, can you hear him, can you hear her?

Richard McKane

23^rd August 2002

ASIYE’S STORY

The translation of your book liberated me –

I wish it could liberate you.

it is almost as though they’re berating me

to say: ‘It must have been draining on you.’

True it’s a busman’s holiday from my interpreting work.

It is pro the real peoples of Turkey, not anti-Turk.

To all those victimised and tortured for writing:

I tell them to keep fighting –

that the true traitors are the perpetrators,

that the shame and guilt should be laid at their doors.

That when they smash down the doors

of homes, when they burst in on men and women’s honour

with violence and violation it is upon our

words and bodies too. No more lying low

and biding our time – Asiye wants her freedom now!

before 14 August 2002

ON REREADING ASIYE’S STORY

There is a solidarity between reader and author

but how much greater between translator and her,

but then as I discovered the right English words

for pain, for hurts, torture and suffering,

for rebirth, coping in the present and returning the future

I realised we were sharing a language of thought and feeling

between our two languages and the overwhelming feeling

on reading was not only in words, but visual, in the imagination,

as you stretched out to me from the smuggled out pages

from the prisons fighting against unjust incarceration

and torture’s treason.

21-24 September 2002

He’s beating her I swear.

The bare facts bear

me out. She didn’t arrive.

Bare fists drive,

anger driven,

‘lessons’ given,

and it’s only trouble and strife that he derives.

4 December 2000

On cue in the Turkish Giggling Sausage Cafe,

as I tackle beans and scrambled egg on toast,

Mike and the Mechanics ‘In the Living Years’

comes on the radio: ‘You can listen as well as you hear’,

and I remember wanting it to be our anthem

for our family therapy that was aborted.

These days I often think of Andrew and my Father

as I try to take the rainy pulse of the autumn

so that in time and in season I can take

on board the new shift pattern and work with the grain

and against the grain long since harvested.

Poetry International Festival at the eponymous

Royal Hall did not pass me by this year,

and the Pushkin Club programme is printed

and posted and suddenly I find myself

eschewing rhyme in my own poetry

and enjoying freedom ‘In the Living Years’.

I, who came back from the dead 18 years ago –

a sort of Second Birth, legs smashed

but my faculties intact, to start again,

to start over – five books before then,

twenty five after, regaining laughter and tears,

friendships, and oh heck love, and love in translation

and poetry – for in these I am well endowed

and these gifts I give are not just one to one

but stretch out to you the reader, the potential reader

wherever you are in time and space,

grieving or in joy, in Russia, America or Turkey

or in my own nest in London, UK

where I am far from cuckoo and ask not

that bird how many years I’ll last.

2 November 2002

Now the Russian Women Poets’ Tour and party is over

I remember Voltskaya’s high voltage verse and read now

                                                                     wild Vera Pavlova.

The rain is pissing down cats and dogs,

oh to be by a fire with burning logs.

Brolliless, my head receives the full downpour.

At that reading I talked to Parm Kaur,

Neil Astley, the editor of Bloodaxe –

I had no axe to grind – we talked Mandelstam tacks,

rather than Turkey. In the locks the keys

were turning – of languages, loves and partings,

of a new period in my life starting

when I would play the poetry and translating field,

be less rigid, more yielding to how I truly feel.

6 November 2002

CORRECTING MISTAKES CREATIVELY

My whole upper body is drenched with sweat,

wet with rain. Shirt and jacket

hang limply, damply reflecting my mood.

Food for thought, but it inclines me to brood

over an espresso in Ahu’s cafe,

where we talk of Ak winning the election

in Turkey and the leader to be imprisoned for reading a quatrain:

can you imagine in Britain a poem causing such friction?

So I sit here, half an hour from the WiPC meeting,

drinking a glass of water, eating

nothing, not even my words or hat.

I am more careful these days that

my words be targeted though I interpreted ‘peasant’

for ‘guy’ and the Russian poets for that made me feel quite unpleasant.

Why do little errors block out the positive feelings?

Why for a single mistake in Akhmatova in 1969 am I still reeling,

and I used to think of the book as that single lapse?

Perhaps it’s time to forgive myself and see the whole picture –

ninety nine percent is not a bad strike rate,

strict on myself, I don’t apply to others the same strictures,

only the Creator perfection can create.

6 November 2002

Ta taa ta ta ta: the tube train clatters.

Does it really matter that I left early

rehearsing my new travel-life from Bromley.

I will not leave my library in tatters.

Does it really matter to have two editions of Akhmatova

rather than four? It’s not even a reduction

for friends will take the books not auction.

When I sat in a chair in Verena’s basement flat,

scarcely time to hang my fictitious hat,

a tiny serrated crescent moon glistened in my eye,

soon to become a whole pool of shining light,

and I swear as we walked to the party I saw flashing blue lights

in the corner of my eye. A hallucination?

Well, hallo to the cynical nation

which sells arms to ‘balance the equation.’

FLAT CHANGING

I can’t write myself out of the fact I feel flat

but perhaps by writing poems I can get a handle on that.

My poems these last years have served me better than a therapist.

I have resisted the inclination to get thoroughly pissed.

They put me back on the admittedly slippery piste.

No singing of  the Internationale with clenched fist:

I’m outside all political organisations

yet I hold firm at my station in opposition

to the positions adopted by torturers and inquisitions.

COFFEEHOUSE POEMS

They have to be not over a page

and written before after or during coffee,

a bit in the style of Roger McGough. He

may still burn with anarchic rage.

But at Rotterdam Poetry International

he was everywhere spelt Roger McCough. He

might dig the rhyme I gauge,

and join those other coughing

poets, long in the coffin:

Klebnicough and Mayacoughsky.

FOR ROBERT STANILOV

When they cut the tall trees down,

from the base to the crown,

they fall the young men

like hanged men

by own hand or the state’s.

So defenestration is deforestation

with a station change for the afterlife.

Two poets will die by suicide,

you the playwright decide.

Will it be gunshot, rope or cyanide,

or a jump from a great height?

Or will some Guardian Angel

hovering behind the curtain,

or Samaritan or simple girl

declare: ‘It’s not curtains yet’

and pull on cords of love

the two poets who are already above

this world, their feet off the ground,

hanging in the air, never earthbound.

15 November 2002

TO MY BEST TRANSLATOR

It is a situation I do not relish.

It purports I have gone against your wishes.

You felt, I think, betrayed.

All the poems tropes and trays

you say have been shown in a premature way.

Yet I did it for the best, I thought,

not to have you caught

out. Ultimately it was boasting

to a colleague, I was indeed toasting not roasting

your work by showing to a friend

the poems that were so near perfect in the end.

I will not allow myself to be brought down,

to walk head hung in London town,

to press in the barbs of the gorse’s crown,

to turn my smile into a frown.

There are people dependent on my interpreting

that I don’t want to let down from this matter far from petty,

yet fear, resentment perhaps, in both of us exude

in art that remains so beautiful,

it is to this premise that we have to be dutiful.

20 November 2002

SONG

I woke up in the Cuckoo’s Nest,

I couldn’t even get myself dressed.

It was all the Experience’s Quest.

Now I was having a forcible rest.

How could I fly from the Cuckoo’s Nest?

I was trying to do my best.

I was putting on a brave face, lest

I’d never leave the Cuckoo’s Nest.

23 November 2002

POEM ON NOT WRITING

THE KHLEBNIKOV INTRODUCTION

Bread Knee Cough

A definite blockage on Khlebnikov,

I can’t set the writing process off,

it’s become a bugbear for months,

I haven’t got  an ounce of intention,

Can’t find Khlebnikov’s genial levitation.

I’ve talked about it till exhaustion,

now I approach with undue caution

what should be delight not caution.

26 November 2002

AT THE DENTIST

Waiting for my bridge to be reconstructed –

I burned the last one.

For the first time I’m inducted

into the private sector,

Half my advance in destruction:

four teeth in ruction.

LEAVES OF GRIEF

I breathe a brief sigh of relief,

then it’s back to the besieged mentality.

‘Mankind cannot bear too much’ mortality:

I am not the thief of time but it’s fief.

The leaves they are a-turning,

it’s too wet to get them burning.

Once grief was green in earnest,

now it’s brown underfoot in the forest

of other concerns, it mounts up like piles of leaves,

yet this poem retrieves the grief of the leaves

for it is planted deep in my psyche

and tonight on the computer I’ll key

in these words and this handwriting will become type,

but I will never give in to commercial hype.

30 November 2002

THE POET TO HIS BEST DOCTOR

You want a book-doctor but the book is a novel,

a novel in which a doctor will unravel,

or so I believe, the plot: a medical thriller.

If I were a novelist,

how could I resist

doctoring your book!

Good doctor, you and I will never retire,

for psychiatry rhymes with poetry

and the lithium you prescribed me never quenched my fire.

So here we are in your room and I prefer

the offered black chocolate and water

and our tonic or tone is not just in the serotonin.

The tectonic shelves may no longer move

nor volcanoes of my paranoia erupt,

by a pebble beach I’ve found a cove

and in my basement I’ve found a crypt.

I feel now the buoyancy of our lives,

that we both let words thrive.

I’ll let you be the doctor of your book,

as a poet you let me off the hook.

3 December 2002

THE INCIDENT

The incident happened in the group

before we had time to write poems on dreams.

Janina had grippe

and Godfrey was thinking of abandoning his tennis dream.

Most of the young people’s week was not bad,

but the group finished that evening very sad.

Yet we achieved a definite solidarity

as I pointed out that violence was in polarity

to the ethics of the group. Paolo was high – felt hilarity

in his devouring cake after cake –

my heart literally ached

when the fight started and he was restrained.

The first incident was when I told him

to put the apple he’d thrown  into the bin.

He picked it up and hurled it in like a ten year old in

a tantrum. On his return Musa

chided him quietly for swearing and abusing

the group. Yasmin had been telling

of her lack of electricity and gas

and her disabled sister. Then Paolo was yelling

and suddenly turned the table over.

I had worked out my poems’ scheme

about the power of good and bad dreams:

was going to tell them of re-versing

the happenings in a nightmare

as I did to my daughter – I still care

for her deeply. But that evening we all shared a nightmare:

a violent act had penetrated the group:

the mood was solemn – no one whooped

but no one panicked, some were icy cool,

but for me I felt we’d sunk the Titanic

of the group together, the friend-ship, and though Paolo was restrained,

Paolo who can rap like a brilliant artist – it would never be the same again.

I wonder now if I hadn’t rebuked him for throwing the apple

and Musa hadn’t taken him to task quietly, nobly

whether to him that explosion would have been less appealing.

The young women and men righted the table,

mopped up the squash with serviettes

and I think now of Godfrey playing squash with his supple wrist

                                                                           and tennis serve

that might be made redundant.

There was no electric current in Yasmin’s flat,

but there was a current of electricity

as we tried to steer the group back to other complexities,

their ‘not bad’ weeks. I was searching for solidarity

and I think we found it: no poems written.

But I’m writing a group worker’s nightmare

poem in reality, but say we all cared

that night, like Demet languageless,

struggling with Paolo brandishing a crutch

as five friends tried to restrain Paolo.

The police were almost called, and hello,

as I walked back to the Tube, having written up the book –

look who’s walking fast towards empty Star House,

Paolo in his black cap and leather jacket

and I realise we are humans not mice

and as far as the group goes we’ll never pack it in.

Now in this rubadub they’re playing clubbing music;

you have scattered, my friends, to the 4 corners of London,

we are all feeling a little sick,

even this poem cannot undo the violence that has been done.

‘So you wait, you wait and wait – girl don’t come...’

Sandie Shaw

You write the words of a sixties song, even hum

them under your breath as you wait in the pub,

no longer making up the crew of a yellow sub,

when these tunes ruled your breathing on X country runs

in rain, shine and snow across the downs

of Marlborough, where there were rides for racehorses.

They used to say ‘horses for courses’

and I now portray great stamina

in human rights interpretation

but this evening I am in a

long waiting situation

or as we interpreters say having a DNA,

nothing to do with the police’s DNA

bank, but meaning Did Not Arrive,

and this is more than a skive:

time out to write poetry: this is how I survive.

12 December 2002

For me to give into safekeeping

half of my library posits problems.

I will be picking the plums

for the new flat to shelve up to the ceiling.

I regard it as a pruning,

an anthologising of my books.

Perhaps it’s more like tuning,

cutting out the reception’s buzz.

My friends, you will not be lost with friends,

if only one book could I take at my end

that would be Mandelstam’s Collected Poems,

a tiny red book – but even for that I’ll find a predeath home.

Some I’d give to Univ and the English to my daughter

and none would go to the skip, the house of slaughter.

These books I still bought in poverty

became my new worlds’ discovery,

then I discovered them for others by translation,

they were my sacrifice, my oblation.

They were my days’ and nights’ equilibrium,

more powerful mood-changers than lithium and librium.

It would be a rare person who could read

the Russian and the Turkish, yet I search for a reader

for my books and poems. My brother Andrew in his fortieth

spoke of less being best. Four of my teeth

have been made into a bridge

which took half my advance for Coffeehouse Poems –

I still take the tube from London Bridge

but even that will stop in our new home.

Poems are dynamite,

paid for by the widows’ mites,

they blast the quarry face,

providing stone to face

the architecture of elegant verse

or the pebbles and shingle: the most terse

commentary of the waves’ rock and roll.

12 December 2002

FOR ZEYNEP

We’ve been writing for many months but that is prose.

You’ve sent me your articles on Akhmatova,

your thoughts and feelings and they’re no pose.

You’ve helped me with your reflections to get over

these months when I’ve been overworking

almost too much Russianing and Turking,

yet somehow I’ve had time to write verse

and have flexed that adversary Time

and we remembered each others’ anniversaries

for they came close together: mine October, yours November,

now as the popular song goes it’s ‘deep in December’

and I am writing in a cafe whose language

I am trying to work out, rather than the age

of the waitress. My guess is Albanian

rather than Polish I’d recognise. I like being in

foreign parts, Turkish, Greek or Italian,

indeed I see myself as the European Union,

a walking United Nations, or Mediterranean

and I entertain grandiose thoughts not delusions

as new countries enter my terrain and promote Utopian solutions.

14 December 2002

CENTURY: AN ERITREAN SONG BY LEMLEM

Century, you have turned,

have turned me into a refugee,

bowed my neck, filled me with worry.

My dreams are never fulfilled –

they’re mostly nightmares.

I’m weak, with self-pity filled,

always hurt and scared.

You make me carry the heavy grief.

Century, I ask you for relief:

why then did you create comradeship, love,

why did you send pride down from above?

12-14 December 2002

SMOKING IN THE PUB

A man, well spoken

who says he’s quitting smoking

inherits two Camels from me,

cadging them softly

though he had his wallet out.

My pipe is blocked and I feel the clout

of the nicotine

hit like the first one in one’s teens,

except I started in earnest in Friern

when I was twenty six,

now plenty of cancer sticks

every day I earn,

not that I have money to burn.

As a father I should have been more stern

when daughter started. It’s her turn

to muck up her young lungs,

my bad example on my conscience hangs.

14 December 2002

NEW YEAR SONNET

Happy New Year: wish it were not Happy New Fear,
as the Holy Land is partitioned
and (friend)ships are about to be requisitioned
and shepherds in mountain villages live in fear
and there is a desperate shortage of Wise Men.
Bethlehem hasn’t been this bad for hundreds of years
and people are picking up the sword not the pen
and the fonts are filled with human tears.
Blood will be shed in virtual reality
on computer or television screens
and all this is actuality,
yet still Christmas comes with its trees,
but now the jollity is more enforced
as preparations for War take their course.

20 December 2002

My glasses on the table by this glass of Guinness.

I am not writing this for you, Your Highness,

but for the people chatting in this Irish Pub,

working people like myself with our own troubles

to drown at the terminus of the year

when even the buses and tubes will stop

and the firemen may go on strike I fear

and I will be late to return as pop

to daughter’s harrowing tales of service,

and soon it will be the winter solstice.

Three books vied for my attention

to finish with the coup de grace,

and Khlebnikov produced in me a tension –

no relaxation – and I don’t smoke grass.

The introduction was holding up the production

of Ten Russian Poets

but at last I banged the hammer at the auction

and sold all the lots.

Coffeehouse Poems was like a crossroad puzzle –

I made the suggested words in Turkish nuzzle

each other and marvelled at the translators’ art.

Tonight is more than a Feast in the Time of the Plague,

though I fear it may roam foreign streets, the death cart.

I have a premonition that is far from vague

that bullets will fly and bombs burst:

round Christmas this is the poem with which I am cursed.

23 December 2002

SONG

Till the white crow turns to black,

till the cows come home,

till no roads lead to Rome,

till the black sheep dominate the flock.

Till the burns flow up the hill

and there is no sugar on the pill,

till I’m poised at the windowsill

and there’s no time to kill.

Forgotten on entering the door,

this song exists no more.

27-29 December 2002

DADA YESYES

The pain trap

The paint rap

Psychic rap

Psyche crap
Onomatopoeia

On a mat a peer

Weird words

Absurd words

Trapped nerves

Capped verve

for this exuberance

this extrovert word dance

will fly you to the cuckoo’s nest

to wrestle with non-rest.

‘You’re living in cloud cuckoo land’

father once said, but how good it is to soar out of hand

on wings over the horizon

and turn my eyes on

lines and profiles

to file up inclines

and interpret omens and signs.

*

In our staff room before Christmas

we were gifted a cuckoo clock.

Each day I see the wounds of torture en masse,

but I don’t allow myself to be a pastor to this flock,

yet round Christmas when Pasternak’s star shines

and his candle, Christian and of love, burns,

I am moved, not so much by the pageantry

but the naked babies to be born this New Year

and try

to accompany them with love into a world without fear,

as He once promised

though that opportunity was missed.

31 December 2002